4 ms·
I couldn't read past the first few analogies. Is there a TLDR? Also, why must pages be without styles and so w i d e? What is this, a manpage? Long form text
by lloydatkinson 5y ago
I couldn't read past the first few analogies. Is there a TLDR?
Also, why must pages be without styles and so w i d e? What is this, a manpage? Long form text should not need to be so wide.
Basic CSS can be applied to a site to make it readable, don't even need to add classes to the HTML to do it.
https://watercss.kognise.dev/ https://watercss.kognise.dev/
Here is the page with readability turned on: https://imgur.com/a/0yzRY61 https://imgur.com/a/0yzRY61
- bruce343434 5y agoA trick to using old web pages like these is to enable reader mode in your browser. In fact, I use that trick pretty much everywhere nowadays.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lapinot 5y agoThe footer provides a hint for the why: > Converted by Mathematica May 30, 2002
- lloydatkinson 5y agoAnd heres mathematica.com 2 years before that. https://web.archive.org/web/20000520004659/https://mathematica.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000520004659/https://mathemati...
- TeMPOraL 5y agoI like pages like that. That's because they let me quickly "style" them to optimal size and shape using tools meant for this job - that is, browser zoom feature and/or window manager's facility to resize windows. It's sad that we've forgotten why web rendering has fluid layout: the whole point was to enable the user to make a web document work for them. In contrast, the modern websites are essentially PDFs emulated with CSS and JS.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoAt 400% zoom in Chrome in order to have a comfortable reading width about 2 sentences fit on the whole 1080p screen. I'm not sure zooming in and out is exactly a nice or helpful user experience.
- iainmerrick 5y agoCan you make the window narrower?
- lloydatkinson 5y agoWhy should I need to though?
- aidenn0 5y agoI think it's annoying that some pages do it one way on some the other; With 16:10 1920x1200 displays, I often run my windows (including the browser) in a vertical tile, but then about 1/3 of pages seem to think I'm on a mobile phone since the resolution is 960x1200 and they make everything giant and hide half of the controls.
- newacc9 5y agoThe trick to fixing wide pages is to 1) open devtools, 2) resize the page, 3) make devtools a popup, 4) then minimize the popup. It works wonders on amazon cloud reader, read.amazon.com, although I am thinking about writing an dev-tools extension to make it even prettier. I believe text should be human scale, which means minimizing the amount of left-right muscle movement of the eyes, resembling as much as possible the format of paperback books.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoThis user hostile and convoluted approach to making a page look readable must the the approach TeMPOraL mentioned above, lol.
- newacc9 5y agoHow else to resize someone else's content hosted in an iFrame? I'm open to suggestions.
- rpdillon 5y agoCounterpoint: pages like this are awesome because they give the reader options! Rather than the website author forcing whatever they want on the reader, readers can read as they please. - I see you know about Water.css: I've used the 'waterize' bookmarklet on pages like this. Similarly for Sakura. - Most browsers have a reader mode, and it works perfectly with this page, as you point out. - Pages like this work really well when printing, either to paper or PDF. Most websites just don't. - The total size of the page is...44k. Overall, I actually prefer pages like this. Ironically, I wouldn't publish my own writing this way because so many people have the reaction you have; I guess I realize I'm in the minority on this one.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoOf course HN is upset someone is critical of manpage style no-formatting of HTML.