Colophon

This site is six hand-written HTML files and one stylesheet. There is no JavaScript, no webfont, no framework, no build step and nothing that phones home. Everything below was decided by reading the research rather than by taste, and the whole design is small enough to explain on one page.

Colour

The page is #faf9f7 with #1a1a1a ink, about fifteen to one. Black on white is twenty-one to one, and that much contrast causes halation — letters that visibly glow and smear — for the roughly one reader in three who has astigmatism. The accessibility guidelines set a floor of four and a half to one for body text; they set no ceiling, which is why so many sites sail past the comfortable band and land somewhere glaring.

Dark mode inverts to #d4d4d4 on #161616, never white on black, for the same reason in the other direction. It follows the operating system. There is no toggle on the page because a toggle needs JavaScript, and your machine already has one.

Type

The body is set in Charter, falling back through Iowan Old Style and Georgia. All three are already on your computer, so the text renders on the first paint: no download, no flash of the wrong font, no layout shifting under your eyes. Charter was drawn by Matthew Carter in 1987 specifically to survive coarse screen rendering, which is exactly the problem a reading page still has to solve.

Serif or sans is a genuine draw in the literature — the fifty-odd studies reviewed on the question do not separate them. Serifs only ever lost the argument on low-resolution screens, which no longer exist.

Measure

Lines are capped at about fifty-seven characters, the lower half of the forty-five to seventy-five range the research keeps converging on, at twenty pixels with line height 1.6. The narrow end is a deliberate copy of the essayists who hold attention longest: Paul Graham's column is a fixed four hundred and thirty-five pixels, roughly sixty characters, and it has never widened in twenty-five years. Figures are exempt and break out past the text. Text is ragged right and hyphenation is off, because justifying text without a real hyphenation engine opens rivers of white space down the page and measurably slows reading. On a phone, where the line drops to about forty characters and the rag turns jagged, hyphenation quietly switches back on.

Everything else

Semantic HTML with real landmarks, a skip link, visible focus rings and no horizontal scroll down to a 320-pixel window. Pages weigh two to three kilobytes each. Footnotes are plain anchors. Images carry their dimensions so nothing jumps while they load. There is no analytics, no cookie, no consent banner, because there is nothing to consent to.

The stylesheet says all of this to itself, in comments, at /style.css.