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by skybrian 3806 days ago
The hard part is not getting a website to serve an HTML page. It's that modern UI standards for HTML publishing are pretty high. Finding a theme that you like and most other people will like (let alone writing one yourself) is a hassle for most people who aren't front-end developers.

You can point to lots of web sites that are hard to read, but that just proves the point that people are rather finicky about it these days.
1 comments
dredmorbius 3806 days ago
The main problem with Web design, I'm increasingly convinced, is that Browser Defaults Suck.

Seriously: if Motherfucking Website, (or Better Motherfucking Website) were the defaults, we'd be ahead of the game. A few other hacks (use "http { font-size: medium }" for example, to default to the user's preferred font size) to further address that.

I'm looking for a browser that defaults to Reader Mode by default. Maybe including comments.

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carussell 3806 days ago
It's fairly straightforward to outline a set of heuristics to use that would trigger automatic reader mode, if you start by looking at the types of pages you'd expect it to work on (e.g., motherfuckingwebsite.com, cr.yp.to, etc) and work backwards. The hard part isn't speccing it out or implementing it, it's convincing Firefox or Chromium that it's a worthwhile thing to roll into the browser.

I've been thinking about this exact thing every other day or so since Maciej Cegłowski's slides[1] for his "Website Obesity Crisis" talk got posted here last month.

1. http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

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dredmorbius 3805 days ago
Maciej is definitely one of the people whose absolutely dab smack on with his criticisms. Bloat, tracking, annoyances, poor design. Most are a direct consequence of advertising-based content support.

I'm thinking of a Reader-Mode browser, period.

Stock stylesheets. Ignore the site's styles. Maybe provide various themes for the user. Further heuristics to strip other cruft. And a "mercy killing" mode which simply abandons all native markup and presents a page stripped of everything, if it's sufficiently bad.

Say the green text on blue background, with every paragraph individually absolutely positioned, centered justification, H2 headings used for body text, and Microsoft "smart quotes" throughout. I've seen all this (though perhaps not quite all on the same page).

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