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Lolno. I have to make Firefox take only half the screen, otherwise HN will render wiiide lines with text. I cannot read lines with >200 characters, then I miss

Lolno. I have to make Firefox take only half the screen, otherwise HN will render wiiide lines with text. I cannot read lines with >200 characters, then I miss the mark when jumping to the next line when it's multiple lines in a paragraph. HN is also the only site I have zoomed in on desktop, as the font is unreadably small on high dpi devices. And on mobile I find it impossible to hit the upvote arrow.

dahfizz 6y ago
I can read long lines just fine, and I like that the full width of the viewport is used. Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want. If HN instead tried to artificially limit the viewport in code (which is something lots of web developers do), they would break all sorts of other use cases for no reason. That's what I mean when I say websites tend to overcomplicate their design.
- matsemann 6y ago
  > Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want. Except you're ignoring mobile devices.
  - Tagbert 6y ago
    No, the say that HN does it works regardless of screen width. If the site were to assign a fixed width, it would conflict with mobile devices.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      This is why CSS has "max-width".
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    I read HN on mobile all the time, what is the problem with it? The only issue i've noticed is being a bit harder to tap the show/hide branch icon but it is a minor issue.
pantalaimon 6y ago
That's why i like to keep an 19" TFT screen as a third display on my desk, most websites render perfectly on it and i can always have a browser in the foreground.
t-writescode 6y ago
I prefer that way, way more than going to, for example, Github and doing a code review and the website refusing to give me more columns to look at in side-by-side view, because they think that the number of lines they've enabled is perfect and want to have the sides of the screen be full of whitespace that you have to modify the layout of the website to get rid of. Or random blog sites that become a narrow column of text and a *huge* amount of whitespace on either side.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Browsers should have more say. In a perfect world, the web developer should not even need to know the browser's width or height, whether it's a phone or computer, or what kind of input devices are available. The developer should simply provide some kind of semantically tagged content (text and images), a list of suggested colors and fonts, and let the browser make the final call, based on what's best for the particular platform and screen size. Somehow we've gotten to this world where the web designer expects almost-pixel-perfect control over the layout of every little thing on the page, user's preference be damned. You're not laying out a magazine page in a desktop publishing application!

dahfizz 6y ago

I can read long lines just fine, and I like that the full width of the viewport is used. Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want. If HN instead tried to artificially limit the viewport in code (which is something lots of web developers do), they would break all sorts of other use cases for no reason. That's what I mean when I say websites tend to overcomplicate their design.

matsemann 6y ago
> Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want. Except you're ignoring mobile devices.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  No, the say that HN does it works regardless of screen width. If the site were to assign a fixed width, it would conflict with mobile devices.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    This is why CSS has "max-width".
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  I read HN on mobile all the time, what is the problem with it? The only issue i've noticed is being a bit harder to tap the show/hide branch icon but it is a minor issue.

pantalaimon 6y ago

That's why i like to keep an 19" TFT screen as a third display on my desk, most websites render perfectly on it and i can always have a browser in the foreground.

t-writescode 6y ago

I prefer that way, way more than going to, for example, Github and doing a code review and the website refusing to give me more columns to look at in side-by-side view, because they think that the number of lines they've enabled is perfect and want to have the sides of the screen be full of whitespace that you have to modify the layout of the website to get rid of. Or random blog sites that become a narrow column of text and a *huge* amount of whitespace on either side.

ryandrake 6y ago
Browsers should have more say. In a perfect world, the web developer should not even need to know the browser's width or height, whether it's a phone or computer, or what kind of input devices are available. The developer should simply provide some kind of semantically tagged content (text and images), a list of suggested colors and fonts, and let the browser make the final call, based on what's best for the particular platform and screen size. Somehow we've gotten to this world where the web designer expects almost-pixel-perfect control over the layout of every little thing on the page, user's preference be damned. You're not laying out a magazine page in a desktop publishing application!