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All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: All you may need is HTML

#131

Post by crabbone »

ozim wrote: post #106
webdood90 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can't get anything done if nobody wants to do the work

I see you got downvoted but people don’t get that choice of technology based on who you can hire is a valid point. I remember a guy who wanted to make company documentation in LaTeX. Well yes it is great tool and we could put it in a git repo and render nice documents for the customers easily. Downside was 15-20 sales people who were not thrilled to use it and spend time learning how to use it.

Hey, I work in a company where user-facing documentation is written in LaTeX! I even contributed few commits to it.

I'm not sure though why sales people would need to edit it.

My discontent with LaTeX for documentation is that searching it sucks. I mean, you do get literal search for words, but if you want something smarter... PDFs don't interact well with searching tools we have.

Another problem: interactive scroll. In HTML documents you can scroll sections of documents independently of each other (if you need to), so you can create ad hoc views of your documentation that could be more useful to you (eg. collapse a bunch of tables or code listings just to see the text in between).

On the other hand, if you want to print it, oh man... it's going to look so much better! :)

Re: All you may need is HTML

#132

Post by college_physics »

> All you may need is HTML

The opposite of a great truth is also a great truth: You may need more than HTML.

The problem is (and I believe this is what the author tries to draw attention to) that people are fighting all sorts of half-backed stacks without necessarily having a fully justified reason for every incremental complication invovled.

The web is obviously more than a "clean page of text" metaphor. How much more we don't even know yet.

What would make this journey of discovery shorter is the simple golden rule that "computational complexity should be commensurate with the result"

Re: All you may need is HTML

#134

Post by ryloric »

bombcar wrote: post #46
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.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT. A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger. (should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of…

> 7 fucking declarations. That's how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece.

Such drastic difference with basic adjustments, damn

Re: All you may need is HTML

#136

Post by enriquto »

ryloric wrote: post #134
bombcar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT. A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger. (should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of…

> 7 fucking declarations. That's how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece. Such drastic difference with basic adjustments, damn

I honestly prefer the original version without css. Plain browser styles have a kind of raw beauty that it's very hard to surpass.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#137

Post by guiraldelli »

bombcar wrote: post #46
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.

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT. A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger. (should mention https://thebestmotherfucking.website of…

I was happy to see someone finally referred to the motherfucking websites.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to see the unique one of those I think it is worth to follow the advice [1] was not cited.

For curiosity reasons, I found out about [1] on a well-known website [2] that definitely puts content in front of presentation, even though I like their website's design.

[1]: https://bestmotherfucking.website/

[2]: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/

Re: All you may need is HTML

#138

Post by savolai »

The bare html files this links to are very unergonomic for human eye motorics, due to long line length (characters per line). They are also basically illegible on mobile. Which begs the question: why is the mobile default stylesheet set up so that text is unreadable without css?

Re: All you may need is HTML

#139

Post by kerkeslager »

kevincox wrote: post #4

> Originally this website's font-family simply requested monospace. This approach resulted in varying reading experience depending on the OS. Windows browsers got Consolas, Linux users got DejaVu Sans Mono, and macOS people got Courier. I find it so sad that our browsers have such bad default fonts that all websites feel the need to override them to get an acceptable look. It would be great if browsers had decent def…

This is what you get when you prioritize companies over users.

There's no reason websites should even be able to set the font in my browser.

If it was just about websites achieving an acceptable look, you'd see people emulating industry leaders, but that's not what you see. Google, for example, uses Arial on its main page on my browsers at least--that's a font that's available on every browser I know of. If it's acceptable for Google, it seems like it's just acceptable in general.

Instead, the fonts being loaded are about websites achieving their own brand. I've built a lot of web frontends, and every time I get a rebrand contract, the designs I get contain a bunch of fonts.

As a user, I don't give a fuck about your brand. Being able to read your fonts clearly is a much higher priority for me than experiencing your brand. Fundamentally there's no reason at all that sites should be able to decide for me what font I read. I am lucky to have fairly good eyesight and no serious processing disorders, but users who have these issues are seriously negatively effected by sites overriding their browser defaults. And since few projects are given adequate accessibility budget, users are left with no recourse. Overriding a website's fonts with your browser settings doesn't really help, because sites often use pixels and other dimension units that make your site unreadable if you use a different font than what they tested with.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#140

Post by PaulHoule »

My feelings are mixed about CSS.

In many cases, a small amount of CSS can give you a lot of control over formatting in a way that is easy to maintain. Over the long term CSS has gotten much better in every respect but one.

That one respect is insofar as there is a "CSS specification" it is this

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-2022/

which itself refers to roughly 50 documents which furthermore has the mind-melting structure of "Document 17 replaces clauses 13.5 and 15.11.9 in Document 3". On top of that you need to refer to

https://caniuse.com/

for browser variations and various cheat sheets

https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/

which I'd usually advise against (you can consistently get the right answers if you look things up in the docs.)

Maintaining other people's CSS is also a bear and even maintaining my own is pretty bad for side projects that I work on sporadically for a few years (I wind up introducing a class to solve this problem and another to solve that problem and don't have much of a master plan.)

Then there are the various CSS frameworks which vary from useful to insane (the original Bootstrap which was about as easy to use as learning to paint with oils) and practices like BEM, which is the webs' answer to RAAI in C.

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