Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.
The "danluu layout" takes minimalism too far in my opinion, and getting in and out of some readability mode can be slow/annoying.
Just a lil bit of padding here and there could improve the presentation a lot, but I'm guessing the author consider this design kind of a trademark by now.
I don't mind Drew or Fabien's layout, which have a reasonable column width. But Dan's site is unreadable for me (at least on desktop) without reader mode. What would be the reason for choosing to have full-width text on a blog?
Dan's website is a great example of the pendulum swinging in the other direction to malicious non-conformism. Yes, UXers have made modern web design hell, but presenting a raw unstyled html isn't respecting your user much either.
I think that is not so simple to solve. Limit it to some column width? Someone will complain that it only uses one third of their screen. Unlimited width? Someone will complain about whole width text. But the good thing is, that there is reader mode and evem if there wasn't, you could zoom in or resize the browser window or send to new window and resoze only that.
Yeah, most browsers do have reader mode now. I honestly don't love them because they're typically not customizable, and are sometimes too narrow for my taste.
I wouldn't mind resizing the browser window except that with tabbed systems that means you're resizing all of the tabs at the same time.
I tend to think that if you make the width something in the neighborhood of what the NYT, Medium, or other well-known sites use, people won't complain. But I could be wrong!
Firefox reader mode is a little bit customizable. Font size column width and so.
Cumbersome, but one can change width of a single tab by using the inspector and using the responsive design mode.
Perhaps there is room for another Firefox feature to limit width of a page. Perhaps multi-column mode, where one can for example split the page in 3 columns and each column displays, what could not be fit on the previous column. And resizable columns maybe.
Huh: my browser is always maximized (the width of my monitor) as are all the other apps I regularly use -- similar to how an iPad worked before iPadOS introduced multitasking -- but then I'm scaling the UI by a factor of 200% and its not a HiDPI monitor, just a humble 1080p one, so the effective horizontal resolution of my browser's viewport is 960 pixels. At that resolution, line of text on danluu.com and in comment sections on HN are longer than
I would prefer them to be, but they're not so long as to be a significant annoyance.
Back when I used an OS that didn't let me scale the UI, I'd occasionally make the browser window narrower to make the lines of text on a site more reasonable, but I definitely appreciated it when sites made it unnecessary for me to do that, by specifying body {max-width: 45em;} or something.
https://drewdevault.com
https://fabiensanglard.net
https://danluu.com
Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.