I found the linked article "Axiomatic CSS and Lobotomized Owls" to be a decent read. I'm surprised that it hasn't been highly upvoted in the past despite having many submissions to HN.
While "Axiomatic CSS" per se has (unfortunately) not quite (yet?) gone mainstream, its origins -- see https://every-layout.dev -- are a profoundly excellent resource, and have been highly influential.
I was trying to figure out what font they are using and when I was inspecting the page I found the comment below. I have nothing in particular to say about it. I just thought it was interesting.
<!--
...
s, . .s
ss, . .. .ss
'SsSs, .. . .sSsS'
sSs'sSs, . . .sSs'sSs
sSs 'sSs, ... .sSs' sSs
sS, 'sSs, .sSs' .Ss
'Ss 'sSs, .sSs' sS'
... sSs ' .sSs' sSs ...
. sSs .sSs' .., sSs .
. .. sS, .sSs' . 'sSs, .Ss . ..
.. . 'Ss .Ss' . 'sSs. '' .. .
. . sSs ' . 'sSs, . .
... .sS.'sSs . .. 'sSs, ...
.sSs' sS, ..... .Ss 'sSs,
.sSs' 'Ss . sS' 'sSs,
.sSs' sSs . sSs 'sSs,
.sSs'____________________________ sSs ______________'sSs,
.sSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS'.Ss SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSs,
... sS'
sSs sSs
sSs sSs
sS, .Ss
'Ss sS'
sSs sSs
sSsSs
sSs
s
YOU ARE YOUR OWN GOD.
YOU HAVE THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.
MAKE THE MOST OF IT.
-->
Pretty sure that is from the church of satan. Which is not about worshiping satan but more humanist / atheist / there is no god but you should still be a force for good.
It's just that their imagery is intentionally quite jarring to christians.
To quote the satanists. It is not them who believe in Satan, its the christians who believe in Satan.
As a European, I find it quite amusing that religion is so central to american culture, that they even figured out a way to make a christian version of atheism.
As a fellow European, I feel we have nothing to be amused about. What the church thinks still has excessive weight in lawmaking and people's opinions. Publicly funded schools have "religion" classes where the local mainstream christianity variant is the main content. And the tax authority is still tasked with collecting the "church tax".
As former resident of several European countries, I find your statement, while not entirely incorrect, a bit too "blanketing".
All this may be quite dependent on where you live (the mention of the "church tax" makes me suppose Germany, as they have a Kirchensteuer, but I'm sure other countries must have a similar tax). In any case, there are European countries without church tax, beyond normal taxes that could be used for preservation of historical sites, religious or otherwise (which I agree may be somewhat biased in what religious sites can pretend to be considered historical).
Similarly, many countries do not have "religion" classes in "publicly funded schools", especially in countries that are (supposedly or admittedly) laic. That being said, there's also often a bias there as a lot of holidays are tied to religion and Christianity in particular, and it'd be quite common to explain in class the origin and nature of these holidays. I'd hardly think it counts as "religion" class, though, but that'd depend on what the teachers do.
In Germany, I was pleasantly surprised that some parties up for election have (regionally) expressed the will to abolish relgion-based studies in public schools. It makes me a bit hopeful, especially since I recently got the impression that young people are skewing more religious again. I have also seen some proposals to abolish the laws currently prohibiting singing and dancing during certain religious holidays.
I think in Germany this is really crying out of boredom. If you want to, you don't have to come in contact with any of it. It was still relevant 30-40 years ago, but not today. Not in any relevant capacity.
Other european countries are more laical or secular, but that is pretty much just flavor today.
Some eastern countries are more involved, but if you propose the church having relevant influence in central or western Europe, you really slept the last two decades.
How so? Religion is still central in many countries in Europe, eg Croatia, Poland, etc. It's even getting stronger as the populace is leaning more to the right every day. Plenty of religious people in the media here raving against covid vaccines etc.
The problem is that Europe is split up into dozens of countries with very somewhat different values and cultures, so whenever you say "In Europe X happens", then you can always invoke some version of your argument.
Europe is France, Netherlands, Albania, Moldova. All of these are very different in various statistics.
I have never been to Croatia or Poland, but of course you are right in that there are European countries where religion has a more central role than in other European countries.
But, how common is it really in Croatia or Poland to use christian terms such as "satanist" when you want to say that you are an atheist?
>It's just that their imagery is intentionally quite jarring to christians. To quote the satanists. It is not them who believe in Satan, its the christians who believe in Satan.
Seems anti-social, especially when injected into a non-religious context like a site about web design.
That site is black on white¹, and has no other colors, images, fancy borders, nor any other obvious “design”—and yet it is remarkably pleasant to look at, even beautiful. The site sells the authors’ ideas; they obviously know something. (Plus no doorslams, cookie warnings, or other annoyances. And an RSS feed.)
† The only problem is that the atrocious #fafafa on #050505 is made a whole lot worse because there aren't a bunch of even worse things distracting you from it.
Okay, I'll bite. Why is #050505 on #FAFAFA (not the reverse, as you stated) "atrocious"? Are we playing the "anything less than #000000 on #FFFFFF is grey text on a grey background and entirely unreadable" card?
I don't understand their complaint either. Some people have a hard time with absolute black on absolute white (and/or vice versa) so easing up a little can be helpful. It's a small difference, 19:52:1 vs. 21:1 contrast ratio. I've seen advice to avoid exceeding 18:1 in large areas, maybe #111 on #f9f9f9.
We tend to focus only on the accessibility issues caused by low contrast, but very high contrast also makes reading more difficult, especially for people with dyslexia -- and it's also more likely to cause eye strain if it's a full-length article.
At any rate, "it's okay for text not to be pure black and backgrounds not to be pure white" has become my tiny hill to die on.
I didn’t really understand why the sibling selector was introduced as a scoped version of the lobotomised owl, as if that was the canonical implementation. The sibling selector has always been underrated.