> 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…
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.
Don’t lump Courier and Courier New together. Courier (which Apple includes) is fine; it’s only Courier New (which Windows includes) that’s atrociously light, because it was digitised very badly incorrectly. It actually used to be not so bad, because they kinda patched it to make it usable with hinting, and then special-cased it in ClearType, but those don’t really go far enough and aren’t consistently reliable anyway, so it’s just an awful font.
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…
You make it sound like an unequivocal truth; it isn't really so. I launched my own hobby website/blog only after I designed my content presentation. It helped me understand what I was writing. Of course I had the underlying drive to write something already, and was not coding up some CSS without a vision.
Everybody finds their writing juices differently. Push where it means you'll write more.
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…
Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. It’ll still load web fonts for Private Use Area code points (icon fonts) and Google’s misbegotten Material Icons with its awful ASCII + ligation technique (see the browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist pref in about:config), but other than that will stick with your preferred fonts. I…
Same here, my Firefox has disabled "allow pages to use choose their own fonts" for ages. I do use Stylus to override a bunch of fonts/sizes in various sites too.
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.
As a Windows wizard, the first thing I do in any browser or text editor is change Consolas to Courier New. I fucking can't stand Consolas, give me Courier New because that font is readable literally anywhere.
Ouch. It really does take all sorts.
Courier New is the most appalling piece of shit I've ever seen in my life. It's ugly at small sizes, jagged and unpleasant at medium sizes, and abhorrent at display sizes. WOW do I hate Courier. I hate it on Git Bash. I hate it in cmd, I hate that it exists. Consolas, by contrast, is lovely and beautifully-hinted at best, and inoffensive at worst.
In my mind "raw browser" look corresponds with "almost insane details coming" as the only sites still using that are often run by people who are WAY more concerned with the content they want to talk about than with the presentation.
Um, shouldn't all people be WAY more concerned with the content than the presentation? I don't want to read stream of consciousness with occasional lack of spaces and random case, but I'd really prefer to only read websites by people who give zero effs to presentation, and I had prior to this moment assumed everyone agreed, but that it was fun to do presentation, so people did. There are people who care about the pre…
If you care about your content, you should care about readability and navigability.
I understand the drive behind this. Having written my fair share of HTML by hand, I'd say that the purpose may be better served by Markdown, or Org, or even plaintext. HTML has too much unnecessary detail if you're into low-effort content-centric stuff and cleanliness. Learning HTML is fine, but learning HTML while avoiding CSS is not very useful, except as an esoteric hobby (like 6502 assembly, but much more complex…
Yeah, Markdown does 95% of what I need, requiring roughly 10% of the keystrokes needed for raw HTML. And you can always use HTML where needed.
> 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.
I agree, but here's the catch: if you're looking for this kind of employee, you won't be hiring "less skilled" people, you'll be hiring "more skilled, more expensive". What people mean by "I will not be able to hire front-end programmers" is actually "I won't be able to hire cheap devs" .
I wish it was that easy... this doesn't account for the dynamics of the job market, the particular niche of Web programming and the perverse incentives created by head-hunters. Much in the same way how programmers (and many others) are scared of "gaps" in their resumes (and will thus accept a job even if their finances would otherwise allow them to extend the job search further, creating more leverage on the employer…
Kotlin has also suffered from this. It gained its credibility due to Google annointing it as the primary language for Android development but, being so close to Java, aspired to replace Java on the server. Sadly, Kotlin's main framework - Ktor - is a joke. The default, Gradle-based Ktor project within IntelliJ doesn't even work and the docs are useless. So Kotlin's server-side aspirations shifted to Spring Boot where it is supposed to be a first-class citizen. In practice there are numerous gotchas for the unwary and if you fled to Kotlin in reaction against Java's archaic practices such as escaping regex metacharacters you'll be disappointed to discover that Spring Boot validation relies on Java-based annotations which means you have to use Java regex patterns. So much for being a first class citizen.
It's also a great example of how even such a little can go wrong. The CSS of the second website is wrong, as it uses 'color' without setting 'background-color'. Assuming anything about the default background color is not possible because it is user-configurable in most browsers. At least http://motherfuckingwebsite.com remains readable when you change your color settings (the second one is completely unreadable on my…
Good point. If the background color changes that often, I'm assuming there's probably a good test out there for that and more. The text was readable as designed on a white-background. CSS that considers accessibility or print friendly is always good to add.
> I'm assuming there's probably a good test out there for that and more.
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…
Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. It’ll still load web fonts for Private Use Area code points (icon fonts) and Google’s misbegotten Material Icons with its awful ASCII + ligation technique (see the browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist pref in about:config), but other than that will stick with your preferred fonts. I…
Sure. But this isn't a viable solution for a lot of people.