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Comment by jarrett | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Namely: typeface, font size, line height, margins, font color, background color. Those are some pretty basic properties you'll want to set for even the most minimal design. CSS is how you set them. (I suspect that almost nobody would want to use the browser defaults for all these values.)

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I'm not saying I disagree, but there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout the web. For the technically inclined, we can always use custom CSS, but often the people who would benefit the most from it are the people who would have the least idea how to do it. Edit: To put it another way, and bring it back on topic, it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue hyperlinks, and I doubt that will change any time soon.

I do realise I'm basically describing Gopher here, and there's possibly a reason it didn't take off...

> there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout the web.

If only browsers provided better defaults. As it stands, very few people would consider the browser defaults acceptable.

> it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue hyperlinks

Yes, Wikipedia does use black text, a white background, and blue links. But they do not merely rely upon the default browser stylesheets. They use custom font-face, font-size, line-height, and margin properties even for the basic <p> tag. And that's saying nothing about all the other elements that often have borders, padding, backgrounds, and so on.

I think you could argue that browser ship with reasonable defaults for a slap of plain HTML, but what it undeniably gets wrong (and rightly so) is paragraphs running the full width of your window.

There's a lot to be said about the Svbtle/Medium-style design with a small column running down the center of the page.

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