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All you may need is HTML

fabiensanglard.net

31–40 of 328 posts

Re: All you may need is HTML

#31

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.

As a good example, his site is very readable (because of the limited width of lines), and the sites he linked to that were largely unstyled were very useful, but not very readable. It would be worth it to me, as a user, to use a browser plugin to add a few lines of CSS to those sites before I dove in.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the default fonts on Apple devices are far and away the best fonts, period. They're better than almost every custom font, especially for readability.

I don't have an Apple device to test but does that mean that the author's point about the default `monospace` font "Courier New, is not legible" is out of date or just a rare opinion?

Depends on your use, in the screenplay world Courier is mandated as the required font and anything not written in it is immediately trashed.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#33
Curious if I am going crazy...

On the main blog page, it sure looks like some of the entries are not sorted properly. For example the 10 Feb 2020 ThinkPad review.

Oh wait a second. Some of the dates are DD/MM/YYYY and some are MM/DD/YYYY!

Re: All you may need is HTML

#35
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…

[deleted]

Re: All you may need is HTML

#37
> Inevitably, you will want to do something the framework did not forecast and will come up with convoluted ways to do it anyway.

I always find static site generators a kind of leaky abstraction. They eventually try to abstract nearly the whole functionality of the web stack, and the larger the SSG the more apparent it becomes. But, for obvious reasons, they just cannot abstract all the peculiarities of the web from you.

I write posts in Markdown, use Pandoc to convert `.md` to `.html` and a simple Go script in 200-300 LoC [1] for my https://hirrolot.github.io/.

[1] https://github.com/Hirrolot/hirrolot.github.io/blob/master/g...

Re: All you may need is HTML

#38
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…

Yes this! If I make websites as a blind person, I'd probably just have CSS give headings 20 PT font size, paragraphs line spacing 2, 16 PT. Something like that. But if browsers used good defaults I could just not worry about CSS and just go with plain HTML.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#39
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…

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.

It is a bit odd that "monospace" in a mac browser gets you Courier/Courier New, because macOS has come standard with Menlo for ages and Monaco since the OS 9 days, both of which are excellent monospace fonts that are far and away better than either Courier. Even weirder, outside of browsers requesting a monospace font will get you Menlo.

Newer releases also have San Francisco Mono that it could use instead, which is even better since it's tuned for modern displays.

Re: All you may need is HTML

#40
> A host for your index.html files Hostgator $33/year plan.

    - Google Cloud Firebase Hosting - free; really good tooling to deploy, automatic CDN
    - AWS S3 + CloudFront - a bit more setup, but more or less free
    - Azure Static Web Apps - free
No need to have any hosting plan.

Firebase Hosting in particular is really easy to get started and connect a domain to it. The Firebase CLI tooling makes it dead simple to deploy updates as well.

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