Poll: Is Dan Luu Right About Website Styling?

[dead]

danluu.com has the following style tag right at the start of the document:

  <style>d{width:4em}li{display:flex;margin:0 0 .9em}ul{margin:0;padding:0}.np{display:flex;flex-direction:row;justify-content:space-between;padding-bottom:.5em;font-style:italic}</style>

He's not saying that you literally shouldn't have CSS.

The important bit is "the site doesn't override any kind of default styling, letting you make the width exactly what you want (by setting your window size how you want it) and it also doesn't override any kind of default styling you apply to sites".

It's the default styling that matters to him.

Whenever someone complains that Dan Luu's site is unreadable and should have a font size of exactly 18px, that means their browser is configured to display text with a font size that is unreadable to them, which is easily remedied by changing their browser's default to 18px. And the best thing is that everyone can choose their own preferred value.

Dan Luu is anti-paternalist. Designers who want to control your experience completely are totalitarians. Designers who result in over five second LCPs or two seconds of CPU on modal hardware like the Tecno Spark 8C are sociopaths.

I do most of my browsing from my phone. On my phone, his site displays perfectly fine. (Apart from the table… mostly because of the colours (black on dark red is illegible), which I guess is supporting evidence for his stance, but also because it doesn't fit on the screen and when I scroll to look at the right of the table, the labels on the left scroll off screen.)

On my laptop however, his site is unreadable, because the lines are too long.

Resize my window, you say? Well, no. When I'm using a website on my laptop, I generally have several related pages open in separate tabs in the same window, and I flip between them. And you want me to resize my window every time I switch between tabs just so I can read stuff? Good grief, no. Why are you forcing such busywork on me?

Configure my browser to enforce a max-width? Now, I'm a technically minded person, which means I know this is possible, and also I can work out how to do it. Most people can't. Even if there's a browser option that says "prevent lines of text from being stupidly wide", most people will never find it.

Should browsers enforce a max-width by default? Personally I think they should… but that ship has sailed, and it's not going to happen.

So actually, my best option on the laptop is to bump up the text size to stupidly huge. Which means less text fits on screen vertically (bad) as well as horizontally (good), and it makes me feel like I'm getting a preview of what life will be like after my eyesight's spent three or four more decades deteriorating. But it's legible. (Except that table nearly gets to scrolling horizontally again… if it was wider and I had to bump the text size back down to get it to fit, I'd then find that my browser had moved me to later in the document, because it preserves how many pixels I am from the top of the page, not how far I am through the text.)

In summary:

- browsers are too complicated to expect most people to configure them to their preferences

- a substantial number of people full-screen most of their windows and resent being forced to manage their window widths

- design is hard; you can't please all the people all the time, even if you try to avoid having a design; there will be downsides to any approach

- one of the downsides of having a world population approaching 8 billion is that there will always be people complaining about stuff when they should just leave it

I am not a developer though I have worked along side many QA and performance teams over the years and would like to share a thought. There are websites that you can point at your site to simulate the experience in many devices and internet speeds to get a rough idea of how your site will perform. I do not have any links handy since I am not a developer. Would it be more practical, pragmatic and actionable to set the goal to getting a passing score on something like 95% of the 90th percentile of most common devices so that you are not spending all your time optimizing instead of operating your business, accepting that you can not make everyone happy?