[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.