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Specifically since this article is all about font sizes, and talks about the site itself as well, I will comment on the site. Its text is ludicrously large and
by chrismorgan 2y ago
Specifically since this article is all about font sizes, and talks about the site itself as well, I will comment on the site. Its text is ludicrously large and exhibits the worst problems of fluid typography.
`font-size: calc(1.25em + .5vw)`. Please never, ever do anything like this.
On a 1920×1080 display, given a browser em of 16px, that would be 29.6px. When practically every other page around will be in the range 16–22px (mostly 18–20px, I reckon). It’s 30–70% too large.
On a 400px-wide phone with 16px browser em, that would be 22px. When practically every other page around will be in the range 16–18px. It’s 20–30% too large.
On my 1706×960 laptop display, it’s 28.5px, and has the dishonourable distinction of being the first site that I’ve actually zoomed all the way out to 50% for, and not felt any remorse at all, because that makes the text effectively 18.5px for me, right about where I reckon is right. I’ve never felt the need to go past 67% before. If it weren’t for the fluid typography, I wouldn’t have even had to, but because the viewport width is such a large part of the calculation, it decreases the effectiveness of the browser’s zoom, so the 50% is actually more like 65%. This also means that things like changing the browser’s zoom will throw you around the document willy-nilly, because it’s working against the browser’s techniques to keep you in the same place in the document.
What it talks about has a clamp() invocation to prevent values from getting too stupid, but the site itself doesn’t have that, and starts already oversized.
This is a real pity, because there’s a lot of good about the content itself—in particular, its remarks on how people accidentally make calculations assuming the browser em is 16px are spot-on. But the content is immediately compromised by the page’s crazy font sizes.
- the_other 2y agoOn the other hand, the site was one of the most comfortable to read, for me, on my phone, with my eyesight. I didn’t have to zoom + pan + scan as much as usual.
- deredede 2y agoDo yourself a favor and go increase the text size (not zoom!) in your browser's (if not OS's) settings.
- the_other 2y agoPlease don’t give disabled people unsolicited advice on how to cope with the world. We know far more about our conditions and tools than you ever will.
- chrismorgan 2y agoNo one even said anything about disability. Almost everyone that lives long enough to get old will end up in such a situation, and many will be in such situations in relative youth, and we don’t tend to consider it disability. Many are the people that use tech, have poor eyesight, and struggle because they don’t know about things like browser or OS zoom or text size adjustment facilities. They just get used to using things in their own idiosyncratic way, and don’t realise better is possible. In my limited experience of enlightening such people when I observe it (in person, that is), I think they’ve always been grateful to learn of such functionality, and it significantly improves their experience. (You being on HN makes it much less likely you’ll be unaware of such things, but still⸺.) If you’re struggling with every other web page, and find this one good, while others are agreeing it’s bad (and, more objectively, it’s unquestionably atypical); if they’re pointing out that there’s a way of effectively applying the difference that you liked in this page, to all pages—well, that seems pretty reasonable to me. Anyway, whether you care to employ it or not (and that is certainly up to you), deredede’s advice is very solid in general. There are a lot of people out there that would benefit from it.
- the_other 2y agoStop trying to belittle and marginalise my experience. It’s disrespectful and insensitive. It’s important that atypical experiences get some kind of exposure. On the web, there’s actually a chance those atypical needs may get a solution, because it’s comparatively cheap to produce accessible versions or modifications (compared to modifying buildings and transport, for example). I raised a counterpoint to the general consensus because no similar point had yet been raised and now I’ve had six paragraphs on why I’ve been doing it wrong. Very disappointing.
- alt227 2y agoFully agree. There seems to be a trend currently to write blogs about web based text in a terribly formatted web font. EDIT: TBH the whole site is terrible on desktop. Everything is too big. I get the feeling this person is mobile focussed.
- robertoandred 2y agoIt’s terrible on mobile, too. Everything is big, plus a horizontal scroll.
- alwayslikethis 2y agoI wish there is a browser extension that would do the following: Evaluate all the font sizes in viewable text, find the median (weighed by character count), set it to my preferred size, scale the rest accordingly. This is akin to volume normalization for audio. Just like TV channels shouldn't increase their volume willy-nilly, neither should web developers get to scream their entire articles at me.