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I never understood why these webpages can't have like, 4 lines of CSS to make them much more readable. Preserve the older aesthetic I guess?
by gf263 10y ago
I never understood why these webpages can't have like, 4 lines of CSS to make them much more readable. Preserve the older aesthetic I guess?
- daveguy 10y agoWhat 4 lines would those be?
- axiomabsolute 10y agoInspired by https://bestmotherfucking.website/ https://bestmotherfucking.website/ body { margin: 1em auto; max-width: 40em; font: 1.2em/1.62em sans-serif; } That seems like a good start
- daveguy 10y agoNice! Thank you!
- moron4hire 10y agoLooks great on my phone. Symantic HTML is responsive by default.
- axiomabsolute 10y agoIt's a bit awkward to read on large screens. Long lines and whatnot
- throwanem 10y agoBut, in demonstration of another virtue inherent in this sort of simplicity, reader mode handles it beautifully.
- zeveb 10y ago> It's a bit awkward to read on large screens. Long lines and whatnot For years and years and years I always had a half-screen-width browser window, precisely because it's easier to read text that way. But then site authors started assuming that I'd have a full-width window, and using CSS to waste half the window width. I still think that the correct response to 'window too wide' is 'shrink the window,' but it's a losing battle.
- albedoa 10y agoWait, why wouldn't the solution be "define a max width"? Site authors should not be wasting your window width, windows should not be "too wide" for text, and you shouldn't have to choose between the two solutions you mentioned.
- zeveb 10y agoOnly because it seems to me that if the user really wants a terribly wide window … that's his choice. Who am I to prevent someone from doing something which seems stupid to me? Maybe he wants a half-inch high window at the bottom of his screen where he can scroll through my text slowly, or something. His call, not mine.
- moron4hire 10y agoOne may find it useful to employ CTRL+PlusKey, CTRL+MouseWheel, pinch-to-zoom, or snap-to-screen-edge.
- massysett 10y agoMaybe because the author's expertise is something other than writing HTML, so he picked up an old book on HTML, marked it up, and that's it. That the browser can render HTML written 20 years ago is quite a virtue. If it only takes 4 lines of CSS to make it more readable, then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) rather than of the author, who should not have to continually update HTML so it renders well on recently-invented devices.
- stinkytaco 10y ago> then the page's lack of readability is more an indictment of the browser (which could do this tidying itself) I strongly disagree with this. The browser should do nothing it is not explicitly made to do, which is one of the reasons it can still render HTML from 20 years ago. We used to have browsers that tried to do that kind of thing and we're only now extracting ourselves from that mess. It is 100% on the website author to make their page more readable.
- massysett 10y agoThe whole point of vanilla HTML is that it has few presentation details. It has some headings, bold, italic, and such. If the page does not specify margins or font size, the browser absolutely should set these so it is most readable on the device. If I write plain HTML today I am not optimizing for some VR headset that will be used twenty years hence. The headset should render the plain HTML in a manner faithful to the semantic markup, not so it looks the same way it looked on Netscape with a VGA screen.
- gf263 10y agoIf you have something worth saying, you can take the 5 minutes it takes to make it readable.
- massysett 10y agoLearning CSS does not take 5 minutes.
- grzm 10y agoAs pointed out elsewhere, the post is from 1999. You're effectively asking the author to, apart from creating the content, to also maintain it over the years to someone else's arbitrary satisfaction. I'm not sure if that's fair. The author likely has other project's they're working on, and maintaining the look of something they wrote 18 years ago isn't a priority. Consider what would have happened if they had just published a book. Likely the book would be out of print and no longer available. This is definitely a step up from that. If this is something that you truly care about, you may want to reach out to the author and offer to provide a maintenane update on your own. That said, be prepared for the author to perhaps consider even the little time it would take coordinating with you and performing any updates not worth their time. Then again, they may welcome your interest and willingness to help.