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This is the right answer. I've never understood why "designers" feel the need to decide what font looks good to other people. You can specify font size and that

This is the right answer. I've never understood why "designers" feel the need to decide what font looks good to other people. You can specify font size and that should be enough.

graemep 2y ago
because the customers have been trained to think that websites are about design. Its something the people paying for the site can understand. It leads to lots of bike shedding too.
dingnuts 2y ago
designers entire profession is around figuring out what looks good to the most people, not just fonts; your comment is so ignorant and dismissive of an entire profession that it's startling. you are hereby cursed to use papyrus to code and you will be forced to drive an AMC Gremlin until you appreciate the value of visual design
- IsTom 2y ago
  I've seen what designers make and I'm mostly not impressed.
- esperent 2y ago
  > your comment is so ignorant and dismissive of an entire profession that it's startling It's unfortunately not at all startling, not on Hackernews. People here have the worst case of being good at one thing (usually software/systems/databases or similar) and assuming this means that they know more about everything else than everyone else, that I've ever seen in an online community. I think it's called Neil Degrasse Tyson syndrome.
tgv 2y ago
You can still build web pages like it's 1999. Nothing is stopping you. You can add menu bars like you're imitating Word 6, for all I care. But people will stop visiting your site. The eye likes candy. That's why.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  The problem is that others are building 2025 web pages. I recently had to pay for parking online (already an annoyance) because the kiosk was broken. That one transaction used like 3% of my data for the month. Why does it take dozens of megabytes to ask for a credit card number, license plate number, and lot id? Please just send me a single 500 byte form with some inputs. I'm not on your site to be entertained. It doesn't need to be a SPA. It needs an "enter your info" page and a "thank you" page.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    I'm guilty of that. Last week I shipped a few updates to one of my sites and completely ignored @ndriscoll's UI/UX guidelines. Can you believe it? Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". Do you even have them written in some document we can easily read/share? Or is going through your entire history of HN comments to figure out your arbitrary preferences expected as well?
    - ndriscoll 2y ago
      Sure, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element has a list of off the shelf elements and what they're for. If you're building a form, you can find the relevant bits under "Forms". In this case, they needed 2 pieces of short text, so they would use 2 text inputs, 2 labels, and a submit button. The lotid could've been in the URL so they could display the name on the page and the user wouldn't need to enter it if they used a QR code to navigate to the page. If they're feeling particularly adventurous, they could spend another hundred bytes on the Luhn algorithm in javascript to validate one of the two inputs. Or they could do it only on the server. It doesn't make much difference.
    - phkahler 2y ago
      >> Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". The problem is that the web designers are the ones "forcing everybody to comply" with their FONT choice and downloading all that font data. Keep the self-centered trait applied to the correct party please ;-)
vFunct 2y ago
It’s because designer know what you like better than you know yourself. They get paid to know you. Never let the user design their own interfaces. Users have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.
wruza 2y ago
This is not the right answer because people have different preferences, both physiological and aesthetic and contextual. The right answer is for browsers to provide knobs for a user that would control relative brightness, contrast, saturation, boldness, fluffiness, comicness, sharpness, height, width, line spacing, and so on. Per browser and then per-site adjustments. A simple sidebar or a drawer.

This is the right answer. I've never understood why "designers" feel the need to decide what font looks good to other people. You can specify font size and that should be enough.

graemep 2y ago

because the customers have been trained to think that websites are about design. Its something the people paying for the site can understand. It leads to lots of bike shedding too.

dingnuts 2y ago

designers entire profession is around figuring out what looks good to the most people, not just fonts; your comment is so ignorant and dismissive of an entire profession that it's startling. you are hereby cursed to use papyrus to code and you will be forced to drive an AMC Gremlin until you appreciate the value of visual design

IsTom 2y ago
I've seen what designers make and I'm mostly not impressed.
esperent 2y ago
> your comment is so ignorant and dismissive of an entire profession that it's startling It's unfortunately not at all startling, not on Hackernews. People here have the worst case of being good at one thing (usually software/systems/databases or similar) and assuming this means that they know more about everything else than everyone else, that I've ever seen in an online community. I think it's called Neil Degrasse Tyson syndrome.

tgv 2y ago

You can still build web pages like it's 1999. Nothing is stopping you. You can add menu bars like you're imitating Word 6, for all I care. But people will stop visiting your site. The eye likes candy. That's why.

ndriscoll 2y ago
The problem is that others are building 2025 web pages. I recently had to pay for parking online (already an annoyance) because the kiosk was broken. That one transaction used like 3% of my data for the month. Why does it take dozens of megabytes to ask for a credit card number, license plate number, and lot id? Please just send me a single 500 byte form with some inputs. I'm not on your site to be entertained. It doesn't need to be a SPA. It needs an "enter your info" page and a "thank you" page.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  I'm guilty of that. Last week I shipped a few updates to one of my sites and completely ignored @ndriscoll's UI/UX guidelines. Can you believe it? Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". Do you even have them written in some document we can easily read/share? Or is going through your entire history of HN comments to figure out your arbitrary preferences expected as well?
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Sure, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element has a list of off the shelf elements and what they're for. If you're building a form, you can find the relevant bits under "Forms". In this case, they needed 2 pieces of short text, so they would use 2 text inputs, 2 labels, and a submit button. The lotid could've been in the URL so they could display the name on the page and the user wouldn't need to enter it if they used a QR code to navigate to the page. If they're feeling particularly adventurous, they could spend another hundred bytes on the Luhn algorithm in javascript to validate one of the two inputs. Or they could do it only on the server. It doesn't make much difference.
  - phkahler 2y ago
    >> Now, let's say I entertain your idea for 0.001 microseconds, we are going to backtrack on the largest human collaborative platform ever created and severely cripple it, forcing everybody to comply with your demands or else they're out of "the web". The problem is that the web designers are the ones "forcing everybody to comply" with their FONT choice and downloading all that font data. Keep the self-centered trait applied to the correct party please ;-)

vFunct 2y ago

It’s because designer know what you like better than you know yourself. They get paid to know you. Never let the user design their own interfaces. Users have absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

wruza 2y ago

This is not the right answer because people have different preferences, both physiological and aesthetic and contextual. The right answer is for browsers to provide knobs for a user that would control relative brightness, contrast, saturation, boldness, fluffiness, comicness, sharpness, height, width, line spacing, and so on. Per browser and then per-site adjustments. A simple sidebar or a drawer.