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All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#61

Post by kitsunesoba »

account42 wrote: post #44
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consolas is not bad. DejaVu is not bad. Only Courier/Courier New are so bad as to be unusable, it seems Apple wants to push web developers to use font overrides.

DejaVu is not a websafe font, meaning you cannot rely on it being available. Why we can't just require browsers to include DejaVu or another open font is another question - not like the size matters compared to all the other crap they ship. Heck, some even ship their own fonts already, but only for emojis. Even having some defined meta fonts with rough metrics so that you could say font-face: monospace-standard or wh…

> Why we can't just require browsers to include DejaVu or another open font is another question

Including a small set of open fonts does seem like a good idea. I'd like to see Inter UI[0] included because it's a very nice screen/UI-optimized font would serve a similar purpose as "system-ui" does now, except without some of the pitfalls[1] that comes with.

[0]: https://rsms.me/inter/ [1]: https://infinnie.github.io/blog/2017/systemui.html

Re: All you may need is HTML

#62

Post by malfist »

cannolicannon wrote: post #48

> "This website used to be hosted by asmallorange. When I became dissatisfied, all I had to do was to open an account on hostgator, upload my html files, and change the DNS entry" At the risk of being pendantic, asmallorange and hostgator are owned by the same entity[0]. That said, I like the premise of just writing and producing content and not necessarily worrying about setting up tooling. I think devs, and "geeks"…

A small orange sure has changed. It used to be dirt cheap crappy shared hosting. Now it's expensive compared to just getting a full VPS nearly anywhere else.

Their VPS offering is $55/month and is comparable to digital ocean's $18/month.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#63

Post by berkes »

martin_a wrote: post #47
ghusto wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication Isn't that what HTML gives us?

Somewhat subtle, but: Yes and No. I'd say HTML for itself just gives us a way to give meaning or imply how something should be styled "headline of first order". In the end it's a markup language, not some magic styling tool. How it is actually styled (in absence of CSS) is in the hands of the default rendering of your browser. That might very well be a very bad rendering, due to lack of knowledge/time/engagement of t…

> I'm quite certain that a large part of the web would need no CSS or just a few lines of it, if the basic (browser applied styles) were good. As in: designed

I think we would win a lot if browsers default styles were beautiful (as in: really good, not merely fancy) designed. Many websites then would need just a few lines to set some colors, style that weird-custom thing they do or make it feel just a bit more personal.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#64

Post by steno132 »

Compare these two websites:

http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/sample.html

https://www.columbia.edu

Which one is: * Easier to navigate?

* Nicer to to look at?

We don't live in a HTML only world because no one wants to live in a HTML only world. Some techies might but 99% of ordinary people do not.

No one wants to look at black and white text all day, with every website looking exactly the same.

If this is what people wanted, then you'd see a lot more of these plain HTML websites. But you don't.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#65

Post by mapierce2 »

CSS could also solve this website's problem of a visitor reading the page title as "FABIEN SANGLARD'S WEBSITE ABOUT EMAIL RSS DONATE" … I thought it was a website about email and RSS and donations for a second.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#66

Post by kerkeslager »

ghusto wrote: post #43
truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

> Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication Isn't that what HTML gives us?

Well, that was what HTML was on track to give us. But once JS and CSS were introduced, semantic HTML that was actually semantic stopped developing, under the assumption that if someone needed, for example, a tab area or slide show, they could develop those themselves with CSS/JS. What we've gotten instead is extremely vague elements like "section" that don't communicate what the elements are.

If HTML were truly semantic, browsers could implement accessibility features around it, but because they're so vague, there's no real way for browsers to do that, which offloads the responsibility onto web developers, who in most cases aren't granted budget to do it. There are a handful of features such as alt properties, but these are pretty limited.

So yeah, HTML should give us that, but that's part of what users gave up when we decided it was acceptable to allow random websites to run code on our machines and tell us how our content should be displayed.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#67

Post by bombcar »

janjones wrote: post #25

> A host for your index.html files Hostgator $33/year plan. > A DNS pointing to the host Hostgator for an extra $12.95/year. Why not use Netlify or GitHub pages? They can host static files for free.

Some people like having access to the tech stack, which a small VPS gets you.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#68

Post by lelandfe »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #50
lelandfe wrote: post #21

As always, I think the custom font hate is overstated. > Custom fonts are a waste of bandwidth Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much. For comparison, it's unlikely you'll see blog authors get up in arms over a single PNG . > they come with one of three evils called latency, FOUT, and FOIT A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be address…

> Latin subsetted fonts are generally 10-30Kb, it's really not that much. Agreed. Make your own custom font files with only the characters you use, or are likely to use. > A few milliseconds of a different font appearing is truly not much of an evil, but can be addressed by exactly what the author links in their footnote. Browsers will wait for about 3 seconds for custom fonts to load before showing a fallback font.…

> Browsers will wait for about 3 seconds for custom fonts to load before showing a fallback font

Depends on the `font-display` value on one's `@font-face`, which is where the author's choices of "latency, FOUT, and FOIT" comes from. For instance, Google Fonts uses `swap` by default, meaning the fallback shows right away: https://web.dev/font-best-practices/#choose-an-appropriate-f... (I also think Safari's `auto` font-display never shows fallbacks, but that may have changed)

But if you use `optional`, browsers will attempt to get the custom font into the first paint: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts-4/#valdef-font-face-font-...

That's often enough. You can go another step further and preload the font, which I generally recommend. This especially helps if the font is otherwise discovered late by the browser.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#69

Post by j45 »

truculent wrote: post #18

I sympathise with the main thrust of the post but, to nitpick, this is just plain wrong: > But mostly css appeals to our vanity and ego. Design isn't just about aesthetics. Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication. The author's effective use of spacing, bold, and code tags show us that they know this intuitively, despite what they write.

A lot of these things were handled by one typeface on a typewriter so the premise isn't entirely unfounded.

Visual communication and design predates CSS. Information architecture, design, guiding the user through the message is definitely a skill.

CSS can do as much distraction as it can enhancement. It's one appeal of Tailwind, it's more than serviceable while learning about the design, hierarchy, and flow.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#70

Post by mapierce2 »

This is another post illuminating the new minimalist trend in website design. The old minimalism was about "elegance", but this new trend is more about utility: we don't need CSS, just content, so why bother! I don't like this utilitarian take. It's fun to design a website.
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