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Comment by mkozlows | Hacker News Reader

It's a starting point, but a starting point that directs users to fake italic, fake small-caps, mismatched mono text, inconsistent apostrophes, and ugly underlines. (Oh, and sidenotes and other margin content just disappears on a phone.) If you're going to start from a template, it at least shouldn't lead you astray in multiple ways.

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It also doesn't maintain your current position in the document if the viewport changes width, which... I'm not even sure how you break that. The user agent usually does a very good job of handling scroll position.

There's a lot of stuff you'd want to clean up before you let Mr Tufte see it.

I'm not sure what browser(s) or site(s) you're referring to, but just now double checking a few sites in current FF and Chrome I don't see them maintaining scroll position at all. I realize that this agrees with my developed expecations for text heavy pages. Text reflow as the page narrows dominates the viewport position -- content getting longer effectively pushes the viewport up the page. To the user, content appears to flow "downward" as the page narrows.

Do you have an example of a site and/or browser that exhibits the behavior you're describing? I'm quite curious if there's an approach to structuring a page that preserves position sensibly.

We've fixed the fake italics, I think I've fixed the mono text (if you're talking about sizing), I've consistentified apostrophes, and changed how underlines are handled. Sidenotes are still a thorny issue (I'd appreciate any suggestions; we're discussing it in the GitHub Issues for the project) and small-caps are still on the to-fix list.

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