Comment by catapart
7 months ago
FWIW, my assumption here is that people who publish like this page are expecting users to use a "reader view" and they're trying not to introduce any styles at all, so as not to conflict with the styles that the reader view will apply.
Otherwise, ' "reasonable default" for lots of text ' is something that browsers provide, using the "system" fonts. Applying a font-family to the entire html or body tags will do the job, because system fonts don't need to download or load into the browser. And since you can even specify the specific system font you want to use, you have a few options like serif or sans-serif.
All of that aside, if I applied a system font and your screen reader applies a different one, what was the point of the extra css? So that's my guess as to why people do this because, like you, I find it very hard to read.
If you're curious, though, Firefox has a built-in reader mode and I think Safari does, too. Last I checked, Chrome's was behind a flag. And then, of course, there are extensions (but extensions to read plain HTML docs seems exactly backwards, so...)
But the default is objectively awful, at least in Chrome.
Seriously: no margins on the images and the images all different widths. No human being would lay out a mixed-media document like this on purpose if they expected other human beings to consume it easily.
(This reflects not so much on the author as on how fascinatingly bad the UX of unstyled HTML is. I remember when things looked like this and we were just used to it because there wasn't anything else on the web).
Let's not forget the issue that comes from Discord being a platform
(which results being hard to copy from)
that Kagi founders use it is a huge red flag that their values and mine do not align.
> FWIW, my assumption here is that people who publish like this page are expecting users to use a "reader view" and they're trying not to introduce any styles at all, so as not to conflict with the styles that the reader view will apply.
I had to, just to get past the first couple sentences.
Sadly no reader view can divine where paragraphs should be, but aren't. This is just lazy editing.
Using reader view would discard all CSS anyway though right?
Depends on the reader view, especially for fonts (some people have a visual-related reason to enforce specific fonts).
FWIW Chrome on Android didn't offer me any reader view on this page, and I couldn't find a way to trigger it manually.