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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

>You dumbass. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever motherfucking screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi.

Except that it's really hard to read on a wide screen. I get it - it's a satire - but it goes too far and fails to make a convincing point because it's not really a functional layout.

There are good reasons for things in design like column/page width/ratios, margins, line spacing, font family/size etc. purely from usability standpoint (ignoring subjective/stylistic choices). You don't need to add 10MB of images and JS/CSS but making sure your sentence doesn't span over 20 something inches isn't over designing things.

Third link is much better.

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Yes that really drives in on those points glad someone took the time to actually present them like that :)

>Except that it's really hard to read on a wide screen.

I think the issue is - who gets to decide how wide the content is. Is it the user or the website? Or to put it another way, does the act of maximizing a window represent an intent or does it represent a default error state that needs to be worked around by laying out the content in a different way.

I think that the user should get to decide how wide they want the content to be. For almost all GUI applications 'Maximize' has always meant "I want to see more of it".

>There are good reasons for things in design like column/page width/ratios, margins, line spacing, font family/size etc. purely from usability standpoint (ignoring subjective/stylistic choices).

What are those non-subjective reasons?

>I think the issue is - who gets to decide how wide the content is. Is it the user or the website? Or to put it another way, does the act of maximizing a window represent an intent or does it represent a default error state that needs to be worked around by laying out the content in a different way.

This is why CSS exists - it separates style from content - if you want what that site has just disable all CSS and you'll get raw content.

>What are those non-subjective reasons?

There are things like optimal line length based on eye travel distance and a bunch of "defaults" that have been found trough centuries of experience in design/print. I don't do design professionally so I don't remember the exact rules but I did take design classes back in high school so I know they exist - I'll let someone who's an expert fill in on what they are :D

What gets me with MFWS, it's that when I really read something, when in flow and only the ideas behind the words matters to me, no amount of presentation will ever help or be of any importance. The most valuable ideas I got were written in old busted books with bare typesetting.

Why not make your window narrower?

I don't entirely agree but I can see the appeal of forcing decisions on ignorant people. Someone might want their browser as wide as possible while favoring sites with narrowed content and not even realize why they like the content in a narrow format.

Do I really have to explain the value of sane defaults to a developer :D

Of course. Developers are the ones who always say "just configure it to your liking." It's the normal folk who need sane defaults!

Slightly more seriously, maybe the sane default should be a sane window size for the browser. Not everything needs to be fullscreen. Or maybe the browser window could be wide but could present a narrower viewport in appropriate circumstances. There has to be something better than having every web site separately specify whatever it thinks is a reasonable reading width.

I guess but a) backwards compatibility probably comes in to play b) can you imagine the level of bikeshedding

Someday you may encounter a person who has trouble zeroing in on a 4px resize handle.

So much this.

I'm spending a great deal of time with a colleague who has significant visual impairments and who, while a domain expert in their own areas, is neither particularly proficient with computer technology nor do they wish to be (there are certain prerogatives which come with age).

Hiding tools for compensating for poor accessibility design behind small, faint, hard-to-see, only-sometimes-visible, and/or other graphical elements is sheer madness.

Case in point: recent builds of Firefox have a "reader mode" feature, which I use heavily (my own visual capabilities are largely intact, but, well, 99.99966% of Web design is crap).

The icon:

1. Is faint.

2. Appears at a corner of the navigation box. E.g., it's not at a Fitts point (top of screen, corner).

3. Worst and most unforgivably: it only appears AFTER a page has fully loaded, doesn't appear on all pages, and cannot be specified as a default (e.g., always open pages in Readability mode, unless broken).

From a UI/UX standpoint for someone who is already visually disabled this is unforgivable.

(Yes, I've submitted feedback to Mozilla on this.)

How is it hard to read on a wide screen? Just make your window smaller. "It's responsive"

You might also be interested in: http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/details/KpMqqB

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