5 ms·
All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypert
by pferde 5y ago
All I see on the Marginalia Plato article is a site that forces an uncomfortably narrow article width on me, while eschewing almost all the advantages of hypertext in the name of some ill-conceived notion of "quieter reading".
I'm not saying it's all bad, though - it's something that could be an option offered to the unfortunate people with attention deficit disorder.
The forced text width, however, is inexcusable.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoYeah I think that's probably from my own habit of never using full screen windows. Though I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that it's very hard to read long lines of text. Most printed books, newspapers, and so forth use that width (max 60ch) specifically because it's hard to follow lines longer than that. I chose to follow book guidelines specifically because that format has been largely stable for some thousand years and is at this point the gold standard for legibility. Usually when things stagnate for that long, it's not because nobody has thought to try something different in all that time. Maybe multiple columns could be an option, I guess. Not sure how to do that well with varying paragraph sizes, though.
- morsch 5y agoOn Firefox mobile, it's more like 11 characters wide. Pretty much unusable.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoHmm, strange. It doesn't have these proportions? <https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/encyclopedia-mobile.png https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/encyclopedia-mobile.png> I sadly can't diagnose since my phone isn't powerful enough to run Firefox. Looks as intended on Firefox desktop with emulation mode, though.
- morsch 5y agoHuh. It looks fine now. Did you change anything?
- marginalia_nu 5y agoNot a thing.
- Macha 5y agoWorks for me on Firefox for Android (Firefox for iOS being just a safari skin). I get 6-7 words per line (looks like the site authors emulated screenshot), so like 40 or so characters
- pferde 5y agoI'd prefer if web designers used relative max width of maybe 80 or 90%, and left it to users to resize their browser windows accordingly. But I realize that is a pipe dream, people are too lazy for that, so I just use custom CSS browser extensions to adjust this on sites I visit regularly. I also actually prefer wider lines, as I don't find following them difficult, and prefer wider lines and having to do less scrolling. It's also fun seeing how a lot of random blog articles which seem long in a narrow layout are in fact very short. :)
- leephillips 5y agoI like the page and, instead of finding the fixed width “inexcusable”, see it as an element of tasteful design that makes the text easy to read, as you’ve chosen an ideal width. The justification would work better if there were hyphenation, though.