13 ms·

Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right. His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is

Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right. His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/ https://danluu.com/

maxxxxx 8y ago
It's funny how something as old fashioned as this blog feels like a breath of fresh air. That's how Google design used to be but is not anymore.
vlaaad 8y ago
It's funny that it still has tracking and is painful to read on the desktop because of full-width lines of text.
- esotericn 8y ago
  On the latter point, just resize the browser window. Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.
  - foo101 8y ago
    I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.
    - asdff 8y ago
      Just have your narrow width as your second browser size. One double click on the tab bar in firefox and you are there. I have a big monitor too but I kinda hate full screen browser windows just because no website is really made for it. Either the line width gets out of control, or it just wraps anyway and I have two huge swaths of blank space on each side of the content.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Eh. I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor. It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example. It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't. edit: Obviously I know what responsive design is. I'm on Hacker News. The author hasn't done it (probably because they have better things to do), you have a trivial option to work around it. The contrast to be drawn is with a site like Medium that deliberately goes out of its' way to be annoying and harder to use for some vague profitability goal.
      - lifeformed 8y ago
        Or the website could just set a width on the text column. Why are we pretending this website is some paragon of design? Simple is good but there are still basic readability standards that are important and can be achieved with one or two lines of css.
      - foo101 8y ago
        > It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design This concept is popular for more than 10 years now. Many websites do it with something as simple as article { max-width: 60em } > It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Take Twitter for web. Reduce the browser to something like 60% or 70% of the screen width. The <div><p>...</p></div> elements containing the tweets are chopped off on the right side. It disrupts my reading experience due to minor resizing. This is most of the web today. > Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't. That's true. I don't want to be resizing my browser up and down for every good and bad website.
      - PavlovsCat 8y ago
        It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. max-width: a bunch of ems;
  - paraditedc 8y ago
    > Hey, I like this chair, but it's too small, do you have one that is bigger? > Just get a smaller house. --- > Hey, we are going to launch our product in a country that doesn't speak English but we don't have i18n ready. > Just ask the users to use Google translate. And you wonder why we can't have nice things. Also, obligatory link: https://thebestmotherfucking.website https://thebestmotherfucking.website
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I literally cannot do this on a mobile device.
petetnt 8y ago
On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Lynx, adjust the styles myself or use a CRT display, but I most likely won't bother. That said I am not defending current state of Medium. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/VXestU1.png https://i.imgur.com/VXestU1.png
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- athenot 8y ago
  Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Usually it will also scale the images in sensible ways. And it's available via keyboard shortcuts, so it's easy to zoom in/out. Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Here's the thing: I don't want the font or the images to be bigger, I want columns to not be this absurdly long. The only way for the user to achieve it is to resize the browser window. There is a "max-width" CSS property for that. No framework or JS required, just a modicum of care. > Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function. It still would using max-width.
  - Tallain 8y ago
    Here's the thing: It's not better zoomed in. Insanely huge lettering isn't any better just because it's suddenly 85 characters wide on your screen, or whatever the goal these days is. At a certain point you have to recognize that even little CSS (max-width, font-size) can actually be a good thing, and when a site lacks this it doesn't make it somehow inherently better, it just makes it harder to read and I am nearly as inclined to simply hit the back button as I am on Medium articles. It's two ends to a horseshoe. The best place to be is somewhere closer to the middle.
shadowfacts 8y ago
Dan Luu's blog is almost there, but personally I'd prefer if there was just a tiny bit of CSS that capped the width of the text. With full width paragraphs, it's not the most pleasant to read.
- mcbits 8y ago
  Stylus (not Stylish) can make sites like this readable enough if you visit them often enough to be worth a couple minutes to fix them. Here's a tiny bit of CSS: body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.45; background-color: #ededed; margin: auto; padding: 0.5rem; max-width: 80ch; } .pd { padding-bottom: initial; } One point in favor of ultra-minimalism is that it's easier to add a few styles than to undo layer upon layer of Bootstrap. (Only undid one declaration here and that wasn't strictly necessary.)
  - movedx 8y ago
    This is an interesting point, actually. Should publication platforms be giving us two choices: their design and implementation; or raw text (HTML) we can style ourselves?
    - mcbits 8y ago
      I think it's too late to get publishers to agree on any kind of sensible conventions within the wild wild web ecosystem. It would require a massive user exodus to an entirely different application for producing, sharing, discovering, consuming and commenting on content with no scripting and leaving presentation/theming up to the user. Just a simple document-oriented markup language, e.g. maybe a subset of DocBook. Ideally it would have no HTML/CSS/JS legacy baggage weighing it down so we can have our RAM back.
      - movedx 8y ago
        Not to mention the fact that by saying, "Just give us HTML and we'll do the rest", you're taking away their ability to push adverts and track you for that juicy, monetizable(?) tracking data. I think this is why RSS did and is dying, although it also seems to be making a comeback.
arkitaip 8y ago
The total lack of styling makes it almost unreadable. Even if you resize the window to get a sane page width the lack of margins makes it uncomfortable to read.
- int_19h 8y ago
  The question you should be asking is, why is the default CSS in your browser making unstyled websites uncomfortable to read? The browser could provide sane defaults for margins etc. It just chooses not to - probably because everything it renders is going to be styled anyway, so why bother? Ironically, the "reading mode" thing that is becoming popular is essentially that - stripping the page of most of its custom styling, and then applying some sensible default style. It's like we went full circle, all the way back to pre-CSS times.
alanh 8y ago
He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS would fix it. I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s responsive and simple. https://alanhogan.com https://alanhogan.com Edit: Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms
- Digit-Al 8y ago
  I mostly like your design, a nice clean look, but I have a couple of comments and a suggestion that you are free to ignore completely. Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. The wall of text from the previous post is obviously too much and is far too difficult to read and keep track of where you are, but using only a third of the screen seem far too little. I'm sure you could double the width of your text without affecting readability. Secondly, I have really good distance vision but need reading glasses. I find the text on your site a bit small. From a distance it just a bit too small to read comfortably and from close with my reading glasses I feel like I need to get too close. Yes, I can increase the font size easily, but how about... My suggestion: decrease the size of your borders by about 50% on each side and then increase the font size by 1 or 2 points. The increased column size will give more text on screen, but the increased font size will make sure it is not too much.
  - dagoat 8y ago
    Disagree slightly on the width. Perhaps a little wider, but I don't hate it. On the font size: Home page gets it, actual posts the font size is far too small IMO
    - alanh 8y ago
      I actually agree and want to increase my main body font size. It’s also probably time to go serif, as sans-serifs are best suited for low resolutions (like for body text on all computers and mobile phones up to ~8 years ago) and serifs shine in high resolution (like on the printed page); today high-density screens are more common. Even “1x” monitors are wide enough that the increased font size they make possible increases the number of pixels available per rendered character. In the mean time, browser zoom will work well!
alexandre_m 8y ago
There's also Pocket that'll happily keep a nice formatted copy of the article from that site, regardless of the current ugliness, making the reading experience on mobile quite pleasant.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jsutton 8y ago
Oh come on, that is not easy to read. There's no reason to go back to the 1990s, minimal styling and good typography with reasonable margins and spacing are absolutely worth it for readability.

maxxxxx 8y ago

It's funny how something as old fashioned as this blog feels like a breath of fresh air. That's how Google design used to be but is not anymore.

vlaaad 8y ago

It's funny that it still has tracking and is painful to read on the desktop because of full-width lines of text.

esotericn 8y ago
On the latter point, just resize the browser window. Pow, you have a choice about how wide the lines are.
- foo101 8y ago
  I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.
  - asdff 8y ago
    Just have your narrow width as your second browser size. One double click on the tab bar in firefox and you are there. I have a big monitor too but I kinda hate full screen browser windows just because no website is really made for it. Either the line width gets out of control, or it just wraps anyway and I have two huge swaths of blank space on each side of the content.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Eh. I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor. It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example. It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't. edit: Obviously I know what responsive design is. I'm on Hacker News. The author hasn't done it (probably because they have better things to do), you have a trivial option to work around it. The contrast to be drawn is with a site like Medium that deliberately goes out of its' way to be annoying and harder to use for some vague profitability goal.
    - lifeformed 8y ago
      Or the website could just set a width on the text column. Why are we pretending this website is some paragon of design? Simple is good but there are still basic readability standards that are important and can be achieved with one or two lines of css.
    - foo101 8y ago
      > It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design This concept is popular for more than 10 years now. Many websites do it with something as simple as article { max-width: 60em } > It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Take Twitter for web. Reduce the browser to something like 60% or 70% of the screen width. The <div><p>...</p></div> elements containing the tweets are chopped off on the right side. It disrupts my reading experience due to minor resizing. This is most of the web today. > Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't. That's true. I don't want to be resizing my browser up and down for every good and bad website.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. max-width: a bunch of ems;
- paraditedc 8y ago
  > Hey, I like this chair, but it's too small, do you have one that is bigger? > Just get a smaller house. --- > Hey, we are going to launch our product in a country that doesn't speak English but we don't have i18n ready. > Just ask the users to use Google translate. And you wonder why we can't have nice things. Also, obligatory link: https://thebestmotherfucking.website https://thebestmotherfucking.website
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I literally cannot do this on a mobile device.

petetnt 8y ago

On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Lynx, adjust the styles myself or use a CRT display, but I most likely won't bother. That said I am not defending current state of Medium. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/VXestU1.png https://i.imgur.com/VXestU1.png

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
athenot 8y ago
Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Usually it will also scale the images in sensible ways. And it's available via keyboard shortcuts, so it's easy to zoom in/out. Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Here's the thing: I don't want the font or the images to be bigger, I want columns to not be this absurdly long. The only way for the user to achieve it is to resize the browser window. There is a "max-width" CSS property for that. No framework or JS required, just a modicum of care. > Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function. It still would using max-width.
- Tallain 8y ago
  Here's the thing: It's not better zoomed in. Insanely huge lettering isn't any better just because it's suddenly 85 characters wide on your screen, or whatever the goal these days is. At a certain point you have to recognize that even little CSS (max-width, font-size) can actually be a good thing, and when a site lacks this it doesn't make it somehow inherently better, it just makes it harder to read and I am nearly as inclined to simply hit the back button as I am on Medium articles. It's two ends to a horseshoe. The best place to be is somewhere closer to the middle.

shadowfacts 8y ago

Dan Luu's blog is almost there, but personally I'd prefer if there was just a tiny bit of CSS that capped the width of the text. With full width paragraphs, it's not the most pleasant to read.

mcbits 8y ago
Stylus (not Stylish) can make sites like this readable enough if you visit them often enough to be worth a couple minutes to fix them. Here's a tiny bit of CSS: body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.45; background-color: #ededed; margin: auto; padding: 0.5rem; max-width: 80ch; } .pd { padding-bottom: initial; } One point in favor of ultra-minimalism is that it's easier to add a few styles than to undo layer upon layer of Bootstrap. (Only undid one declaration here and that wasn't strictly necessary.)
- movedx 8y ago
  This is an interesting point, actually. Should publication platforms be giving us two choices: their design and implementation; or raw text (HTML) we can style ourselves?
  - mcbits 8y ago
    I think it's too late to get publishers to agree on any kind of sensible conventions within the wild wild web ecosystem. It would require a massive user exodus to an entirely different application for producing, sharing, discovering, consuming and commenting on content with no scripting and leaving presentation/theming up to the user. Just a simple document-oriented markup language, e.g. maybe a subset of DocBook. Ideally it would have no HTML/CSS/JS legacy baggage weighing it down so we can have our RAM back.
    - movedx 8y ago
      Not to mention the fact that by saying, "Just give us HTML and we'll do the rest", you're taking away their ability to push adverts and track you for that juicy, monetizable(?) tracking data. I think this is why RSS did and is dying, although it also seems to be making a comeback.

arkitaip 8y ago

The total lack of styling makes it almost unreadable. Even if you resize the window to get a sane page width the lack of margins makes it uncomfortable to read.

int_19h 8y ago
The question you should be asking is, why is the default CSS in your browser making unstyled websites uncomfortable to read? The browser could provide sane defaults for margins etc. It just chooses not to - probably because everything it renders is going to be styled anyway, so why bother? Ironically, the "reading mode" thing that is becoming popular is essentially that - stripping the page of most of its custom styling, and then applying some sensible default style. It's like we went full circle, all the way back to pre-CSS times.

alanh 8y ago

He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS would fix it. I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s responsive and simple. https://alanhogan.com https://alanhogan.com Edit: Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms

Digit-Al 8y ago
I mostly like your design, a nice clean look, but I have a couple of comments and a suggestion that you are free to ignore completely. Firstly, I hate sites that use such a narrow column on the screen. The wall of text from the previous post is obviously too much and is far too difficult to read and keep track of where you are, but using only a third of the screen seem far too little. I'm sure you could double the width of your text without affecting readability. Secondly, I have really good distance vision but need reading glasses. I find the text on your site a bit small. From a distance it just a bit too small to read comfortably and from close with my reading glasses I feel like I need to get too close. Yes, I can increase the font size easily, but how about... My suggestion: decrease the size of your borders by about 50% on each side and then increase the font size by 1 or 2 points. The increased column size will give more text on screen, but the increased font size will make sure it is not too much.
- dagoat 8y ago
  Disagree slightly on the width. Perhaps a little wider, but I don't hate it. On the font size: Home page gets it, actual posts the font size is far too small IMO
  - alanh 8y ago
    I actually agree and want to increase my main body font size. It’s also probably time to go serif, as sans-serifs are best suited for low resolutions (like for body text on all computers and mobile phones up to ~8 years ago) and serifs shine in high resolution (like on the printed page); today high-density screens are more common. Even “1x” monitors are wide enough that the increased font size they make possible increases the number of pixels available per rendered character. In the mean time, browser zoom will work well!

alexandre_m 8y ago

There's also Pocket that'll happily keep a nice formatted copy of the article from that site, regardless of the current ugliness, making the reading experience on mobile quite pleasant.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jsutton 8y ago

Oh come on, that is not easy to read. There's no reason to go back to the 1990s, minimal styling and good typography with reasonable margins and spacing are absolutely worth it for readability.