Live data from Hacker News

All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

181–190 of 328 posts

Re: All you may need is HTML

#181

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.

> Design isn't just about aesthetics.

Why dismiss aesthetics out of hand like this, equating it with vanity and ego? Aesthetics are very important to people, possibly even more so than the information on the page.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

personally I miss the vanilla html of the late 90s (unless advanced guis) same went for emacs I stopped using themes

Yeah, I actually like the oldest of the three best. The one with 7 css declarations was annoying to me somehow and the third option was garbage. I miss websites that were about conveying information.

It's a social dynamic thing. Whenever there's too many people it becomes a mess with scams, business, fads, over-engineering, regulations...

Mailing lists are still good for that I guess.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#183

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.

> Design isn't just about aesthetics. Why dismiss aesthetics out of hand like this, equating it with vanity and ego? Aesthetics are very important to people, possibly even more so than the information on the page.

Aesthetics are more important than content?? Where did you get that idea from?

Re: All you may need is HTML

#184

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.

It's also the case that the default stylesheets for the web are terrible, for historical reasons. If the default stylesheets were reasonable, then at least 80% of the time you could just use semantic HTML5 and be sure that your presentation was at least OK in terms of visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. As things actually stand, you need at minimum "100 bytes of CSS to Look Great Everywhere", and if that doesn't meet your needs, a classless stylesheet.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#185

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.

In my personal, obviously anecdotal, experience it's always the "technical" guys who think things like this. This is why we have UI/UX teams and we don't let programmers create visual interfaces.

Because reading words requires substantial styling enhancements over what the browser is already capable of? Has anyone picked up a book lately?

You need a UI team to create a page of readable text? That sounds like an expensive waste.

But it sounds like those 'UI' people think they know better and don't need suggestions from programmers about reading words, even though its what they do all day.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#186
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 acce…

If you bought a magazine you don't get to choose the fonts either.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#188
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…

personally I miss the vanilla html of the late 90s (unless advanced guis) same went for emacs I stopped using themes

The default Emacs theme is not great, but the current best practice is to stop messing with themes and just use modus (vivendi or operandi depending on your light/dark preference), especially since they are now included as part of Emacs.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#189
Remember that “All you may need is HTML” is a general guideline to keep things simple—a starting point rather than a hard rule. Even OP is using a PHP generator, 113 lines of CSS, and a web font to opine about the virtues of HTML.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Too oversimplified ... no images (with captions), no other media (video, audio), no tables or grids, etc.

almost gasp like a book.
Post reply on HN