Bad styling is intentional to deliver the content to a wider audience?

You don’t recognize default HTML appearance?

I do, and it's not the default HTML appearance but the default style of how your browser chooses to show unstyled HTML.

Just because it's the default doesn't mean it's suitable for reading and it was never thought of being that.

How exactly does unstyled HTML cater to a wider audience? That's just a non sequitur.

Because it is a smaller download, is faster to render, easier for accessibility tools, and is more likely to work in readers and browsers of all kinds.

Yeah, a single `body { max-width: 50em }` is not going to change any of that, and actually makes it more accessible to a wider audience. The entire point of typography and formatting is to make text more accessible. Lack of layout is the antithesis of that.

Then there's the separate issue of overlong paragraphs, which is simply a sign of poor writing (again making the text less accessible), unless you're trying to argue that the use of fewer <p> tags makes the page faster to load and render?

Now, I do wish that browsers had saner default styles, so one wouldn't need even that single line of CSS, but that's not the world we live in, and for whatever backwards-compatibility reason we're stuck with how things were in 1995.

Now you’re agreeing with the main idea but you wish the default was more to your preference. Read his own words about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731878

I don’t understand though. Times new Roman and clones of it are very readable fonts. It just doesn’t look like short form marketing material.

If you defend the styling by saying it's efficient, and they say you can have efficient style so that's not a good reason, they are not agreeing with your main idea.

> body { max-width: 50em }

I have this 16:9 screen. I'd like to use all of it, thanks.

Filling a wide screen with one column is just going to hurt your ability to read it. That's not a great desire to have.

(I'd suggest more than 50 but not a whole lot more, not nearly enough to fill a normal size screen.)

It doesn’t work well on anything where you can’t manage the window width. My eyes have to travel too far to read the content, slowing me down.

Luu could achieve his goals while still adding basic things like padding, margins and better structuring of his paragraphs.

Absolutism on either side of this debate is purely ideological and does little to serve the user the best possible experience.

I am user who thinks I’m getting a better experience, so I think his main point is right - you are expressing your preference with the voice of the general user, and moderation.

"Better" is subjective and debating such a vague generality will get us nowhere.

Instead, I will focus on more objectively measurable aspects such as flexibility and ergonomics. You may be getting the most flexible reading experience, but you are getting the most ergonomic reading experience. You also have to put in up-front work to get a better experience, or rely on tools like Reader mode.

If that's what you prefer, that's fine. If you weren't aware, in most browsers you can access the menu bar and navigate to "View -> Page Style", and set it to "No Style".

Then you're free to add whatever styles you'd like on top. Meanwhile, the casual, less technical, non-designer user can still engage with the content in an accessible and easily parseable manner.