Hacker News Reader

Comment by Too | Hacker News Reader

> It's like we woke up one morning in 2008 to find that our Lego had all turned to Duplo. Sites that used to show useful data now look like cartoons.

That is the best description I've heard of the recent trend of making every item cover 30% of the page so that you can only fit 2 data points. What is the deal with all this? Keeping the number of options down is one thing, but making repeated tables of data gigantic serves no purpose at all. It might look good in a thumbnail of a screenshot but actually using it is next to impossible.

View on HN

I particularly like this quote:

These comically huge homepages for projects designed to make the web faster are the equivalent of watching a fitness video where the presenter is just standing there, eating pizza and cookies.

That is what we call fashion. With the bandwidth and CPU/monitor power, the utility part is no longer in focus, so fashion part dominates.

Fashion do not need to make sense. Sensible folks (the minority part of family) may choose to ignore fashion; but if you are criticizing fashion (with seriousness), then you are in the wrong game.

That would explain why engineers often dress like shit.

On the other hand the creative, intellectual minority that wants and needs fast access to information is left behind which is a cultural and economic collateral damage of fashion.

If we're using fashion as an analogy, it's kind of a mixed bag.

There's both this type of fashion: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c0/66/12/c06612029...

...and this type of fashion: http://img.izismile.com/img/img7/20140521/640/fashion_runway...

out there.

Things can be fashionable, yet crisp and usable. Things can also be crazy, stupid (to most), and groundbreaking (to a few). Put another way, fashion currently dominates, but that would be okay since we don't need to sacrifice good visual design in the name of performance any more.

Unfortunately:

* People get lazy. * People don't user test. * People like to follow trends. * Designers and developers get micromanaged.

...along with all of the other monkey wrenches that most developers and designers have gotten used to. People end up building cool-looking websites that aren't as usable as they should be.

He gave that talk in Sydney, Australia. Oh, but if only The Sydney Morning Herald had been there and reported on it! We could have read about it on 3.4MB of downloadable content (actually, not just "content").

Their beta website takes up 1.1MB. I highly recommend that you add the following Adobe busting filter though (given that in their "Satellite" script Adobe attempts to bust your ad-blocking, I think you should bust their busting...):

  http://assets.adobedtm.com/*$script,xmlhttprequest,domain=~assets.adobetm.com

This is the HN community's fault (not even web fora in general, it's HN specifically). Post a page with the default text size here and you'll get a raft of complaints that your text is "tiny". No, my text is the same size as web page text has been for decades. But users with enormous monitors don't set their DPI correctly and web browsers don't display pages at a sensible scale for the screen size.

A sensible scale is defined by the user's eyes, and most sites are not designed with impaired vision in mind. Web page text has never been set at a good size by default, and most designers make it smaller than the default because they have good eyes and aren't thinking about visual impairment.

The default text size in every browser, as far as I'm aware, is actually 16px. The text on Hacker News is 12px, because virtually every designer decides they know better than the browser settings.

Which one are you thinking of as the "default"?

Nobody should be specifying fonts in pixel sizes anyway. Just use ems everywhere and let the browser scale them for the current display resolution.

"Designers" hate this because they can't massage every pixel into just the right location on their cinema display and can't be bothered to accommodate different hardware. They'd rather just send users 300 DPI images of everything and let the proles deal with downsampling them on their ever so inadequate devices.

The CSS px unit is actually usually (for high-DPI devices) defined as 1/96″.

I'm thinking the size you get when you literally do not specify a size. If you say that's 16px then I believe you.

And yes, HN itself is smaller than that.

I'm more likely to complain about the comically huge fonts on sites like Medium or various "modern web designer" blogs. When I browse on my old 1024x768 laptop, often there is literally less content on the screen than what used to fit on my old CGA monitor (80x25 characters). And about half the time they deliberately slow down the scrollbar to make it even harder to read. If I'm lucky, zooming out won't trigger an increase in font size, and then I can actually read the text for 30 seconds until "sign up for my newsletter" pops up and I leave.

It doesn't matter how big my monitor is; I walk away from a lot of websites thinking I need a larger one.

I think it had to do with mobile. Things are scaled to screens, and mobile is the lowest common denominator of what can fit on a screen. Just blow that you to desktop on you have Duplo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com