[asoneth]

> The decision to skip CSS by depending on https://simplecss.org/ is smart

I was always a little disappointed with how most web browsers choose to render HTML pages that had no explicit styling information. I'm not necessarily saying web browsers should have defaults as opinionated as simple.css, but the default page margins, padding, text styles, headings, etc that they picked aren't particularly attractive.

Opinionated web developers will override the defaults no matter what they are, but if the convention was to have more attractive defaults I wonder if that would have resulted in a larger share of personal websites and blogs created using plain HTML.

[simonw]

That's a historic artifact. If a browser shipped new default CSS today it would break 30+ years of existing web pages.

[thejohnconway]

They should have brought in nicer rendering with one of the HTML versions, or with a flag.

[asoneth]

Oh absolutely, that ship has long since sailed, it's just me lamenting a world that could have been if something closer to simple.css or tufte-css had been the norm.

Though with "reader mode" becoming more popular I wonder if there's a place for a browser with more opinionated defaults.

[MrVandemar]

Hyperbole. It wouldn't "break" all the web pages, they would simply render differently.

[california-og]

There's a lot of sites between pure html and modern css. "Simply" rendering things differently would definitely break a lot of sites. Just imagine if browsers started defaulting to *{box-sizing: border-box;}.

[MrVandemar]

I applied it to my site for a minute. Didn't break a thing. Just noticed a slight indent to a few things.

[chrisfinazzo]

There's a reason why the CSS ["reset"][1] is still with us - the lower level user-agent stylesheet never really adopted any of this stuff. Presumably, this was to reduce the delta between browser engines (vendor prefixes, etc, etc.) but it would be nice to see some movement in this area.

[1]: https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

As you point out, people who care will use some of the defaults and override others as they go along, but a small bit of effort goes a long way:

    html, body {
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
    }

    body {
      line-height: 1.6;
      -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    }

    img, picture, video, canvas, svg {
      display: block;
      max-width: 100%;
    }

    input, button, textarea, select {
      font: inherit;
    }

    p, h1, h2, h3 {
      overflow-wrap: break-word;
    }