[alecst]

I admire all the work the typographers do to make amazing-looking websites, and yet I prefer to read sites (like mathpages, or Dan Luu's site) which have next to no styling. They're just easier for me to read. I'm definitely not hating, but I feel like it's good to keep in mind where the point of diminishing returns is.

[brailsafe]

The practice of typography includes everything from the very basic of readability of body text to headlines to how everything is laid out on a page, and sometimes that means doing as little as possible, because the defaults are often great.

[gherkinnn]

> Treat text as user interface

> Slightly more famous examples of unornamental websites that treat text as interface are: google, eBay, craigslist, youtube, flickr, Digg, reddit, delicious.

If only the article recommended doing just that.

Gradients and spinning globes, and intricately designed animations aren't typography. Though Stripe's typography is exquisite. Amusingly enough, text that takes up the full horizontal space is not.

[criddell]

I’ve bought a bunch of Stripe’s books and all the ones I have are beautiful objects. My one complaint is the text in some is too small for my aging eyes. I ended up getting an electronic version of Dream Machines for my ereader where I could choose a larger font.

[vintagedave]

> next to no styling

MathPages (which I just looked up) has styling, but its styling is the _browser default_. And that default has mostly not changed for a quarter century. It is simple, and familiar, though I think a few tweaks like bigger margins against the window edges would make it more readable. One example: https://gist.github.com/JoeyBurzynski/617fb6201335779f8424ad...

May I spruik my own site? I have a very simple site, with no Javascript, that embodies what I believe are good typographical principles. It has a particular focus on typographical layout reproducing century-old-style (remembering a hundred years ago is still a modern, post-WW1 design era!) https://daveon.design/about-dave-on-design.html#typography-&...

[red_trumpet]

Going on a tangent here, but may I ask why you don't have hyphens enabled? Especially with justified text, one tends gets large spacing around words without hyphens, which seems to counteract the effect of larger spacing after ending a sentence.

[alecst]

What is an example of a page with no styling, then, if not one that uses the defaults? :)

[vintagedave]

I get your point: there are no CSS stylesheets or style elements on MathPages at all. Thus, no styles...

The thing is, there are no pages that use no styling! Defaults are styling: they are just choices the browser manufacturer made. Resetting those has its own cottage CSS industry: https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

I used to view default browser styles as not really styles. Then recently I started trying to use old HTML elements, like 'align', as a way to see if they behaved differently (solved problems with) CSS styling. It turned out that in Safari, Chrome and Firefox, the attributes behaved the same as setting CSS styles -- which makes sense from an underlying architecture point of view (why have two ways to set, say, left alignment?) but shows that the engines are CSS-based, that there is no such thing as not using styles, even using non-CSS, old-fashioned pre-CSS HTML.

[karaterobot]

> next to no styling

Remember that "no styling" is just the default CSS styling for typography, which somebody painstakingly created so that it sort of works. Pretty much all you need to do to make perfectly readable text on the web is make the column narrower. You can certainly improve it, make it more beautiful and readable, but it's acceptable as is. The real problems arise when people override those default styles with worse ones. So, we can either force people to use their browser's proprietary typography—which is not the spirit of the web—or teach 'em to do it better, which should really take about an hour.

[rednafi]

Same. Not every webpage needs to look like stripe’s homepage.

[atoav]

Guess what. Simplistic typography is also still typography.

Just like design or VFX in films people tend to think about typography when they notice it is there. But good design/VFX/typography is often invisible.