[something123]

I don't really like the fetishizing of Tuft's style.

If you actually read his books, what he actually does is present a mental model for what to take into account when designing. But his style isn't meant to be the end-all of typesetting or data presentation! The books aren't saying "see, I made this design for the following reasons. Now everyone should emulate me!" It's just one solution in the realm of all good design solutions.

One example I would immediately point to would be ggplot2. A wonderful library in a lot of respects, but the defaults are absolutely horrendous!! The default grey background with white lines was just pulled from one of Tufts's books without a second of thought b/c these grey backgrounds are horrible waste of ink when printing and are actually chart-junk b.c most of the time you have a white background - for-instance in a powerpoint (<- that was a funny b/c Tuft hates powerpoint)

Here too, the cream colored background looks gorgeous on paper and just weird and out of place on a webpage.

[hadley]

It's completely not true that ggplot2 defaults were copied without thought from Tufte.

A pale grey background is not chart junk because it does not distract the eye (and indeed it actually enhances colour). You are using Tufte's terms without really understanding them.

[something123]

Sorry I misattributed that. I swore I saw the same style somewhere in his book. I still think it's horrible =) (sorry)

I remember one of the other preset themes was a lot better (though I have a lot of trouble trying to find a list of them)

I absolutely love your libraries and all that you've done with R. You've really transformed data analysis for me. Thank you.

[leppr]

>Here too, the cream colored background looks gorgeous on paper and just weird and out of place on a webpage.

Sounds like a case of habit. Or would you say Hacker News background color look weird and out of place too? To me it is easier on the eyes, but more importantly having white as an accent color is useful to emphasize or separate graphs and figures from the main text.

I can't agree more with your general point though. Mindless copycating is a plague.

[_Wintermute]

I'm sceptical that ggplot's default was inspired by Tufte, it goes against almost every point he makes in 'The visual display of quantitative information' in terms of data to ink ratio. I have to disagree with yourself and Tufte in this case though, as I think it works really well.

[laughinghan]

> I don't really like the fetishizing of Tuft's style.

Just so we're clear, this isn't some fanboy trying to imitate Tufte, this project is partly by Tufte. Is someone creating something promoting their own work and style fetishizing themselves?

[ritchiea]

But the practical implementation of CSS that mimics the style of his books completely misses the lessons in the books whether it's an official Tufte project or not. It may be a useful tool but it does not help anyone understand what's important about Tufte's work.

[laughinghan]

Tufte evidently thought it would help people understand what's important about his work:

> the goal of Tufte CSS is not to say “websites should look like this interpretation of Tufte’s books” but rather “here are some techniques Tufte developed that we’ve found useful in print; maybe you can find a way to make them useful on the web”

It's really not just mimicry. For example, a distinctive design element is the cream colored background called out by the grandparent comment:

> Here too, the cream colored background looks gorgeous on paper and just weird and out of place on a webpage.

In fact, it was chosen deliberately to deviate from paper:

> Although paper handouts obviously have a pure white background, the web is better served by the use of slightly off-white and off-black colors.

Other examples include:

> Sidenotes are a great example of the web not being like print. [...] The goal is to present related but not necessary information such as asides or citations as close as possible to the text that references them.

> In print, this means [graphics] are not relegated to a separate page. On the web, that means readability of graphics and their accompanying text without extra clicks, tab-switching, or scrolling.

[philh]

> The default grey background with white lines was just pulled from one of Tufts's books without a second of thought b/c these grey backgrounds are horrible waste of ink when printing

I don't follow. If it's a waste of ink, why were they in a book? And why is it bad to copy them to ggplot, which - well, I don't know whether print or screen or neither is considered its primary focus, but there's no denying that it's used a lot for screen graphics, and those don't need to worry about ink.