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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

Centered text, large white borders, and larger than standard font size are all design. Minimal design, but it does feel very different if you look at it completely unstyled:

http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png

I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.

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This is the full stylesheet:

  <style type="text/css">
  body { font-size:18px; }
  .wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin:0 auto; }
  </style>

I feel like you're being a little unfair here.

Still needed style. The good point is, we don't need to be extremist.

Maybe you are right, but maybe we can be extremist and it will still work:

http://weinzierlweb.com/words.txt

ASCII text, copied from Firefox, added links and emphasis manually and formatted with par in vim.

But the question is, should we see that as structure or design?

Partially I was reacting to the words saying: "There's not much code on this page at all, just simple markup for paragraphs, hierarchy, and emphasis."

That's quite beautiful for such a small stylesheet.

I once almost started a web site called SimpleStyleSheets that had that goal -- maximum of 4 lines of CSS, no ugly compression, maximum of 120 characters per line. And see how good you can make a page of simple semantic content look.

I should do it now -- it'd be a good exercise in this day of complex designs and bloated styles.

It could even be a little smaller if the max-width and margin were placed on the body tag. You don't even need the wrapper!

This wouldn't work with background colors though, would it? I imagine the document background color would be undefined outside the body then. Do you suggest putting the background color on the html element? I never saw that.

Beautiful? It's a tragicomedy! Even the most minimal stylesheet shows how unintuitive CSS is: To center content, your don't use the word "center"!

Let's kick it up a notch:

What we call unstyled really means that only the browsers default CSS is applied. To me that feels like the design of 1995, NCSA Mosaic, early Netscape and all that.

To get rid of that I applied Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS 2.0, it looks like this:

http://img.weinzierlweb.com/wordsr.gif

Although 1995 would have had a grey background.

Almost forgot about that. Ah... those memories!

I like your version even better. ;)

The point of the post wasn't: "un-style everything!"

The point was that simple, unadorned words on a page can be powerful and effective.

It's the difference between serving a steak with just a little salt to help complement the steak-ness, vs serving a barbecue sauce dumpling held together with cow protein. It's about whether the added style exists in order to augment the central content, or whether it's trying to be the main attraction in its own right.

The OP doesn't argue against styling. It argues against design cruft. The point is not to forgo design, but to focus on design that enhances content.

Words are the substance, style is the presentation. The focus should be on the content with style in a supporting role. You can't convey content without a style, so at the very least you should ensure that your styling doesn't detract from the message you're imparting. The first bite is with the eyes, as they say.

I couldn't agree with you more. It illustrates particularly well the fact that there is a line in the sand to be drawn and that it is ambiguous. His is just but one perspective on a site that serves up one type of content.

I don't think it really subverts the message. The default browser style is simply unusable given the widths most people have their browser set to. A minimal stylesheet to bring it back to usability is reasonable.

The point is that people have, at times, become a bit too obsessed with style, interactivity, pictures, colors, fonts, video, audio, etc. Sometimes, you just need to focus on the content. If a minimal stylesheet helps with that (just keeping a reasonable column width, and reasonable font size, to make the text readable), that doesn't really affect that message at all.

Oh wow he actually DID write that in a little city in British Columbia. I assumed he was pulling metadata and serving people different answers.

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