[SoftTalker]

A number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also.

Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect.

Fortunately there's reader mode.

[phkahler]

>> Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long.

It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your window. YOU determine the page width and the content reflows to fit.

The problem was when it took off and a bunch of publishers and print people came along and demanded control over the layout. Now they even have custom fonts FFS.

[civilized]

I grew up with simple HTML pages. I love them to death for this reason and others. I'm still very happy every time I come across one that seems to still be alive.

I'm sure it was done for a reason - popularity, A/B testing, money, an IMHO misguided sense of aesthetics - but personally, I definitely never asked for the "design"-ization of the web.

[lstamour]

The real problem is viewport meta and how you have to opt in or opt out: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m...

If you opt in, a simple page like this ends up looking pretty modern anyway, but plain, while if you opt out, your site is often rendered as if made for an older desktop monitor, like this one.

Another way of putting the problem, we preserved old desktop styles rather than invent new default responsive styles for touch-based browsers.

Without a standard like grey backgrounds and blue links to fall back on, websites had to start making decisions, especially when sites go responsive. At that point it is easier to invent new styles… there aren’t that many useful defaults to fall back on.

This is particularly true for HTML5 form controls, which rarely look good in any browser without styling…

But perhaps there’s hope for the future as new design language becomes HTML tags. E.g. details has an arrow, datalist builds a native autocomplete, and so on. It’s a shame that dialog doesn’t have native formatting tho, or that the idea of creating new, modern default styles hasn’t caught on yet in a cross-browser way.

[noufalibrahim]

I don't know if all super simple pages are by good people but the reverse has lots of good examples to support it. https://bellard.org/ is another than comes to mind.

[dev_tty01]

>Fortunately there's reader mode.

Yes, this. Given my older eyesight, having reader mode set to an easily legible larger size makes lots of simple web pages much more readable for me.

[Tor3]

Why would some special mode be needed? I use ctrl+ to get a font size I like, then I set my browser window to a size where the text reflows to what I like. HTML is made to make it easy for the reader. And equally easy on mobile (phone, tablet)

[dev_tty01]

Yeah, sometimes I use that for a site that is otherwise well formatted but the font is just small. For sites I visit often I just save that as a site specific preference so I do agree with you in some cases.

However, with reader mode it goes straight to my preferred font size, has nice margins, and basically everything is formatted in a very readable way. It still reflows and changes width with the window, but the rest of the formatting is better as well. I really hate text that goes right to the edges of the windows with no margins. Just a personal preference, but for me the quickest path to dramatically improved readability on some sites is reader mode.

[Akronymus]

Tbf, I HAVE encountered sites where zooming in makes it even less readable/prevents zooming/adjusts the font size to be roughly the same when you zoom in.

[Tor3]

Yes, and that's why just HTML (without js unwished-for enforcement) is great.

[gonzus]

I wish I could upvote you a thousand times. I hate it when pages have a fixed width -- that's what reflow is for. Let ME choose how I want to read the content.

[drdec]

Did you try resizing your window?

[SoftTalker]

Sure, but I use a tiled window manager and normally have my browser on its own screen so it takes up the whole screen. Even with a narrower window, it's easier to read text when there's a margin also.

But like you say, not a really big deal. There's always reader mode, or local CSS overrides.

[taopai]

I like websites like this.

Simple fast, and, as you say, you can use reader mode.

Some people have blogs like this arguing that the user should have the power to customize his experience, for example, using a custom CSS. So they deliver plain html, with a very basic CSS sheet.

[noisy_boy]

Apart from the point of reflow mentioned in sibling comments, it is also less distracting. I am not wowed by the beauty and cleverness of the CSS, so I'm actually paying 100% attention to the content.

[teo_zero]

Why reader mode?! It simply strips all styles and only retains contents. This webpage has no style, so reader mode should do nothing. If you see differences, it means your browser has different defaults for reader mode and normal mode. Choose which you like most and set it as default.

[mejutoco]

I suspect because reader mode has a reasonable max line lenght, and OP was complaining about that not being set on the page.