6 ms·

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it.

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem is in fact our own fault, not Ben's. Wow. We'll... get on that. Sorry. FINAL EDIT (hopefully): Not necessarily a bug so much as classic cache skew... explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868

dymk 5y ago
The page presents as an almost pure black background, and almost 100% white text to me - about as high-contrast as you can get. Maybe this is a light/dark mode issue?
- ollien 5y ago
  Yeah - on my phone it's WoB but on my desktop (which is dark mode) it's BoW
- jacobsenscott 5y ago
  I think it is because the font is so thin it looks gray, even if the thin lines are made up of 100% white pixels. FireFox reader mode makes it readable though.
- kentonv 5y ago
  I don't have dark mode enabled. What I see seems to be the default style, and is consistent across multiple browsers for me.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Very interesting. This is what I see - https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png
    - kentonv 5y ago
      Huh! It's more than just colors, you have padding between paragraphs whereas I don't. I think the page must not be loading correctly? I do see these two stylesheets returning 404: https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css
      - dymk 5y ago
        The padding for the paragraphs is indeed coming from prisma-dark.css - that would explain it!
    - pc86 5y ago
      This is almost exactly what I see on Edge 64-bit 96.0.1054.62, Windows 10 19042.1415
    - ajkjk 5y ago
      This is what I see: https://imgur.com/dN7nPOS https://imgur.com/dN7nPOS . Almost unreadable after a few minutes, it's so faint.
tyingq 5y ago
The weight was the problem for me. document.body.style.fontWeight=600 in the console made it readable. It also has <p> styled with a zero margin, which makes things hard to read as well.
benadam11 5y ago
- it has an 8+ contrast ratio so I thought it would be ok (also been mostly working in dark mode) - will update. Thanks for your feedback.
- kentonv 5y ago
  I think some of the stylesheets are not loading correctly, I get 404 on these: https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css
coldpie 5y ago
A browsing tip: In Firefox, you can right-click on low-contrast text, select 'Inspect (Q)', and a thing will pop up showing all of the attributes of the text. You can uncheck the 'color' styles to restore a good text color, the filter at the top of the list helps find the 'color' entries. For some reason everyone loves grey-on-grey these days, so I find I'm doing this a lot. I've been thinking of writing a Firefox extension to auto-detect the page background color and set the text color to the polar opposite of that. Haven't done it yet, but I'm getting close.
- 6DM 5y ago
  I'll do you one better, just use reader mode. It's the document looking icon in the url bar to the left of the bookmark button.
  - mgkimsal 5y ago
    reader mode often gets past many 'subscribe to continue reading' overlays.
    - effingwewt 5y ago
      Is also my go-to to avoid clicking either 'accept all' or 'click here to read 10 pages of dark patterns to maybe disallow a few trackers' cookie modals.
- justemre 5y ago
  There is an addon for this actually. Adjust colors for your own pleasure and press F2 (or whatever you want). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...
  - coldpie 5y ago
    Thanks, this looks great. I'll give it a shot!
benadam11 5y ago
Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.
- kentonv 5y ago
  Hmm I don't see any change yet but LOL if the 404s turn out to be my own fault due to a Workers bug. :)
  - benadam11 5y ago
    https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ has the updated styles but the change doesnt seem to have propagated to domain yet (made the background pure white instead of grey)
    - kentonv 5y ago
      Yeah that page looks much better, not just the colors but also the headings and paragraphs are now formatted correctly. Crazily enough, it looks like the missing files are actually a problem on our (Cloudflare's) end. We're looking into it. But a re-deploy should fix it for now, I think.
      - kentonv 5y ago
        Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard? (It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.) The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally deployed before that fix... we're working on that.
        kentonv 5y ago
        On further investigation we think this might have been purely a caching issue, not the backend problem we originally suspected. The problem is that your site generator produces different file names for each version, but doesn't preserve the old files. So when you upload a new version, then the old version of the assets become 404, unless they happened to be cached. But it's possible the HTML is cached and the CSS not cached, in which case people will get the old HTML which refers to a CSS file that is now 404. This is a classic problem and we need to find a better way to solve it. In principle, though, you could manually avoid it by preserving older versions of the CSS such that they continue to be served under new versions of the site. Alternatively, if you change the config on your domain so that it doesn't cache at all (or at least turn off the "cache everything" option), and instead rely on Cloudflare Pages itself to manage caching, that also should mostly* avoid the problem. Pages does do its own caching, so adding a second layer of caching on top of that shouldn't be necessary. * There's still a problem if someone is unlucky enough to load the site exactly when it's being updated, but at least a refresh fixes that. We need a better answer, though...
joegahona 5y ago
This page is almost unreadable for me too -- a giant oil-spill of light gray text on a white background with no discernible headers, no spaces between paragraphs, etc. Brave, desktop, Version 1.33.106 Chromium: 96.0.4664.110 (Official Build) (arm64)
winternett 5y ago
This happens with so many sites now... UI and 508 compliance seem to be going out the window lately... Almost thought I was goin blind. :(
kiddico 5y ago
It's a surprisingly small world we've created
rPlayer6554 5y ago
This kind of thing is why I love to be on HN. It's so interesting to be able to discuss technologies with the people that created them.
ordiel 5y ago
This is slightly similar to that moment when checking code and ask who is the dumb ass who wrote a certain piece just for git blame to show your name...
acdha 5y ago
As a Cloudflare customer, I really like that you were comfortable just taking responsibility and jumping on it. That’s a healthy sign in an engineering group.

dymk 5y ago

The page presents as an almost pure black background, and almost 100% white text to me - about as high-contrast as you can get. Maybe this is a light/dark mode issue?

ollien 5y ago
Yeah - on my phone it's WoB but on my desktop (which is dark mode) it's BoW
jacobsenscott 5y ago
I think it is because the font is so thin it looks gray, even if the thin lines are made up of 100% white pixels. FireFox reader mode makes it readable though.
kentonv 5y ago
I don't have dark mode enabled. What I see seems to be the default style, and is consistent across multiple browsers for me.
- dymk 5y ago
  Very interesting. This is what I see - https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png
  - kentonv 5y ago
    Huh! It's more than just colors, you have padding between paragraphs whereas I don't. I think the page must not be loading correctly? I do see these two stylesheets returning 404: https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css
    - dymk 5y ago
      The padding for the paragraphs is indeed coming from prisma-dark.css - that would explain it!
  - pc86 5y ago
    This is almost exactly what I see on Edge 64-bit 96.0.1054.62, Windows 10 19042.1415
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    This is what I see: https://imgur.com/dN7nPOS https://imgur.com/dN7nPOS . Almost unreadable after a few minutes, it's so faint.

tyingq 5y ago

The weight was the problem for me. document.body.style.fontWeight=600 in the console made it readable. It also has <p> styled with a zero margin, which makes things hard to read as well.

benadam11 5y ago

- it has an 8+ contrast ratio so I thought it would be ok (also been mostly working in dark mode) - will update. Thanks for your feedback.

kentonv 5y ago
I think some of the stylesheets are not loading correctly, I get 404 on these: https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css

coldpie 5y ago

A browsing tip: In Firefox, you can right-click on low-contrast text, select 'Inspect (Q)', and a thing will pop up showing all of the attributes of the text. You can uncheck the 'color' styles to restore a good text color, the filter at the top of the list helps find the 'color' entries. For some reason everyone loves grey-on-grey these days, so I find I'm doing this a lot. I've been thinking of writing a Firefox extension to auto-detect the page background color and set the text color to the polar opposite of that. Haven't done it yet, but I'm getting close.

6DM 5y ago
I'll do you one better, just use reader mode. It's the document looking icon in the url bar to the left of the bookmark button.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  reader mode often gets past many 'subscribe to continue reading' overlays.
  - effingwewt 5y ago
    Is also my go-to to avoid clicking either 'accept all' or 'click here to read 10 pages of dark patterns to maybe disallow a few trackers' cookie modals.
justemre 5y ago
There is an addon for this actually. Adjust colors for your own pleasure and press F2 (or whatever you want). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...
- coldpie 5y ago
  Thanks, this looks great. I'll give it a shot!

benadam11 5y ago

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

kentonv 5y ago
Hmm I don't see any change yet but LOL if the 404s turn out to be my own fault due to a Workers bug. :)
- benadam11 5y ago
  https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ has the updated styles but the change doesnt seem to have propagated to domain yet (made the background pure white instead of grey)
  - kentonv 5y ago
    Yeah that page looks much better, not just the colors but also the headings and paragraphs are now formatted correctly. Crazily enough, it looks like the missing files are actually a problem on our (Cloudflare's) end. We're looking into it. But a re-deploy should fix it for now, I think.
    - kentonv 5y ago
      Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard? (It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.) The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally deployed before that fix... we're working on that.
      - kentonv 5y ago
        On further investigation we think this might have been purely a caching issue, not the backend problem we originally suspected. The problem is that your site generator produces different file names for each version, but doesn't preserve the old files. So when you upload a new version, then the old version of the assets become 404, unless they happened to be cached. But it's possible the HTML is cached and the CSS not cached, in which case people will get the old HTML which refers to a CSS file that is now 404. This is a classic problem and we need to find a better way to solve it. In principle, though, you could manually avoid it by preserving older versions of the CSS such that they continue to be served under new versions of the site. Alternatively, if you change the config on your domain so that it doesn't cache at all (or at least turn off the "cache everything" option), and instead rely on Cloudflare Pages itself to manage caching, that also should mostly* avoid the problem. Pages does do its own caching, so adding a second layer of caching on top of that shouldn't be necessary. * There's still a problem if someone is unlucky enough to load the site exactly when it's being updated, but at least a refresh fixes that. We need a better answer, though...

joegahona 5y ago

This page is almost unreadable for me too -- a giant oil-spill of light gray text on a white background with no discernible headers, no spaces between paragraphs, etc. Brave, desktop, Version 1.33.106 Chromium: 96.0.4664.110 (Official Build) (arm64)

winternett 5y ago

This happens with so many sites now... UI and 508 compliance seem to be going out the window lately... Almost thought I was goin blind. :(

kiddico 5y ago

It's a surprisingly small world we've created

rPlayer6554 5y ago

This kind of thing is why I love to be on HN. It's so interesting to be able to discuss technologies with the people that created them.

ordiel 5y ago

This is slightly similar to that moment when checking code and ask who is the dumb ass who wrote a certain piece just for git blame to show your name...

acdha 5y ago

As a Cloudflare customer, I really like that you were comfortable just taking responsibility and jumping on it. That’s a healthy sign in an engineering group.