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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

>> For MDN that means bold typography that highlights the structure of the page, more contrast, and a reduction to the essentials.

And less actual content, forcing you to scroll or zoom out.

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I'm pretty tired of having to zoom way in on every website I visit just to get text to a readable size. I think the size on these pages looks and reads great. I can count on one hand the number of times I've arrived at a website and had to zoom out because the text was too large.

Even Hacker News I have permanently zoomed to 125% and sometimes find it to be too small.

Bravo Mozilla, looks great!

> Even Hacker News I have permanently zoomed to 125% and sometimes find it to be too small.

This is an issue of eyesight, a ridiculously high DPI without corresponding scaling, or both.

No, the grandparent comment resonates with me. I have good eyesight (when last tested, four years ago, it was better than 20:20) and use monitors with standard DPI on standard resolutions, and yet it suddenly strikes me that never in my life have I had to zoom out on a web page, and yet I frequently zoom in (including on Hacker News). Standard font sizes really are too small.

I don't zoom in most websites these days[0]

HN, Google, DDG and Wikipedia (the mobile version is nicer) are the ones I can't use without setting to 125%.

[0] An upside of the mobile first trend?

EDIT: Eh, scratch that. Just noticed Github (125%) and Twitter (110%) are also on the list ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure how much is age... I notice that reading my phone is often harder than desktop. I usually have a set of reading or computer glasses with me, but don't need them except for things that are close. Stuff on the phone always seems a bit small. Maybe there should be an effort to consult designers over 40 on some of these web sites/apps.

For Hacker News specifically: Verdana at 13px (12px for body text) was a fine choice at 72 dpi.

HN didn't exist in the 1990s, but its design principles are from that era. The look itself is a nice throwback, but the type size follows a technical constraint that no longer makes sense (it only made sense when CSS was nonexistent or very limited).

I really wish HN would change to at least PX for the spacing... similarly for margin space.

Do you know that this is the case? I agree that some brand's attempts at minimalism center around removing features, but MDN's example page doesn't appear to have major dimensional changes or any obvious content absences.

Plus, improving typography and cohesiveness of design language can aid speed of navigation, when done carefully.

That said, I did think MDN's current design was both usable and modern, so it wasn't high up on the list of sites I was hoping for a refactor of...

The layout in the screenshot looks pretty similar to what's already there... just the header branding and a few fonts are different.

Comparison: http://imgur.com/a/81cYg

The only thing I'd like to see different there would be a slightly smaller font size on 'Syntax', seems a bit large. Other than that I like the new design.

your image shows that almost half of the page content is under the fold.

So what? Is scrolling really that big of a deal?

The increased font size and more pronounced page hierarchy make it easier for me to grok the page structure at a glance and navigate to the section I need (since I'm probably not reading the entire page front to bottom if I'm at an MDN link).

Why does all information need to be above the fold? It's not like I can interpret everything on the page in the 1000ms necessary it would take me to scroll.

> So what? Is scrolling really that big of a deal?

Yes.

How?

Cognitive load of paging.

This is not a new and unexplored concept.

I call B.S. --

Below the fold arguments only make sense when you can't grasp the purpose of the page without scrolling.

You're not supposed to cram every piece of information you can above the fold. The information that is getting cut off in this case is hardly pertinent to the understanding or navigation of the site.

Their image shows that the information density is basically unchanged. That was the point they were trying to make, as a refutation to the grandparent's complaint: "And less actual content, forcing you to scroll or zoom out."

> your image shows that almost half of the page content is under the fold.

No, it doesn't. The Array.prototype.slice() documentation is eight screens high on my Macbook Pro.

Note also the difference in vertical size of the two screenshots - you're comparing apples to oranges.

...it's documentation, not a news article. 90% of the page content is going to be under the fold regardless.

Except that MDN isn't your hipster startup website with a 20MB hero image that needs to get its point across immediately. You're never going to end up on MDN and say "I have no idea what this is". You're there because you already know what's under the damn fold.

Indeed. This is a stupid update.

Thanks for convenient comparison. Most significant differences from the first sight: - Reduced / removed breadcrumbs: not OK. - Inverse text/background: not OK in general. - Removed "last contributors": not necessary, IMO neat "community" perk. ~ Increased colour contrast: not necessary. ~ More aggressive headings and sidebar navigation: not necessary. + Preserved Dino: phew, I'd miss him. + Search (bar?) at the intuitive place: YAY, FINALLY!!1!

And unrelated, the new Mozilla logo: still cannot get used to it; seems like the calligraphic humble old one was vandalized by some 1337 H4X0RZ :|

I think the difference is negligible. It's not as if MDN is serving up single page resources as it currently stands.

Is scrolling really the big of a barrier for information? It seems like a fair trade off to me. They're current design tends to blend together for my eye when scanning and is difficult to "jump" to the sections I'm looking for.

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