This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this ___domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what purpose, nostalgia?
I think there's a middle ground to be struck between making something harder to use and making a page that won't even load text without JavaScript, something I find more and more.
Same here. Tried to read the "C without the stdlib" article on my phone, it was only readable in landscape mode and i gave up after the third time the screen rotated and i lost the line where i was reading. I tried it later on my desktop with 27" screen and all the content was aligned to left, keeping 80% of the screen black. I opened developer tools to align the content to the middle and wondered where the layout came from, there was almost no css. Then i realised that the author did every linebreak manually with a <br> in html. Yeah that's oldschool... facepalm
Yes, it is really harder to use! The use case here is "user reads the text", not "user with large screen reads the text". I click on the link on my phone and I can't read the text. Even with pinch-zoom to fill the screen, I can still only sort of read the text. If I must gain expertise with the stylesheet of a site in order to manually re-style it to fulfill its primary use-case, then that site is very hard to use.
I'm not even arguing with the theory here. Proxying gopher text files to a simple text-based website is a really nifty idea, but this implementation has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. An implementation of this that conscientiously picks and chooses web platform features that aid in usability (for instance, perhaps responsive layout and typography) while rejecting those that are unnecessary for this use case (perhaps javascript) would be neat.
I'd argue that a client purpose built for viewing this kind of raw-text content with formatting to fit the user's preference is better - and defaults as you describe.
That said, the enforced BRs are silly.
I'm finding as I move more and more to a CLI for every day tasks, things like gopher and plain-text web sites are much more accessible to me. Part of my response above comes from a desire to see a simple, consistent means of providing textual documents with minimal requirements or assumptions about what makes something useable for people.
