What so it just styles your site to look like a dry academic paper? What use case does this have? I imagine someone out there really needs this and the target audience is small.
But don't most academic papers actually look very different from this? Usually, conferences and journals provide style files that look very different from this website.
I see out-of-the-box latex looks mostly in shorter student reports - although even there, you often get more modern looking styles.
I don't know about everyone but for me there is this weird effect style has on how serious I think the text is.
When I read something written in the style of a medium post I sub-consciously think of the material as being shallow. While reading this type of LaTeX style I would start taking it more seriously. But the texts with most serious look to me are non-formatted pages, like the ones on danluu.com or even plain text posts like this one: http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/bocode/t/transint.html
Me too. Your comment perfectly nails it. I'd guess with a wet finger that it is learned: our brains probably look for clues to quickly assess the quality / trustworthiness of a document. This is why style is pretty important: it certainly affects a lot many people's perceptions.
By the way, this is also why I used serious words like "brain" and "assess" and avoided typos: to make my comment look trustworthy. I had to put a front warning in terms of "wet finger" to lower that a bit though. The Hacker News style and context already make it feel far too scientific already.
For texts like in your link, I automatically expect they are written in the 90s by some very clever person and when I find some that are from the 2000s or later, I think "wow, this is actually new!".
What would be your impression with such a text written in Comic Sans? I would probably be completely lost I think.
Ever seen any science prof's course subject pages, with those fantastic ascii formulae, 1992 nav buttons, and grey background with "color:blue" links? Not everything needs this, but some things need this kind of almost trivial improvement to their presentation.
there are plenty of people that appreciate "dry academic papers" - they're called academics.
there are also plenty of blogs written by academic types that aim for minimalism.
Yeah but it's very edge-casey and not everyone's an academic so the target audience must be very small. Otherwise why write the CSS for it. If I wanted to write a CSS library I would be aiming for a large audience (but that's just me; always trying to have maximum impact)
Of course the audience this is intended for is pretty niche. Afaik there is only one other LaTeX-like library (the one I built my version upon) that achieves such a style. I don’t expect my version to blow up like bootstrap or whatever at all. Getting a maximum impact with a CSS library nowadays is extremely hard imo. I mean, we already have thousands of CSS libraries that are pretty much the same, right?
Unless your audience pays you, where's the ROI? And without an ROI, what's the point in going for maximum impact? That's just wasting time and effort that can be spent on other things: apply a stylesheet, and move on to the things that actually pay off.
Did you have any audiences in mind? Were you thinking a one size fits all or just a larger niche?
Success of CSS themes depends a bit on fashion, so there's some risk that a popular theme will implode by getting too popular and then feel bland, overused. Or shifts in preferred styles making the theme look dated.
The LaTeX approach is sort of an anti-style. It's a uniform. I'd bet that this CSS theme will send the same message (I am an academic, and this content is for academics) for many years. A uniform should actually gain popularity as its used. Although you are correct that the reach of this theme may be limited to just academics who create websites.
lol what kind of person doubles down on a mistake/error/bias after being shown that error? do you really want me to now go and show you how many academics there are that publish papers using latex? or even publish papers in latex and publish to blogs? you probably will still claim for some reason that your initial guess was correct.
I see out-of-the-box latex looks mostly in shorter student reports - although even there, you often get more modern looking styles.