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