Hacker News Reader

Comment by kinkrtyavimoodh | Hacker News Reader

By all means today's content websites are an abomination, but I don't see why we need to throw the baby out with the bath water by completely rejecting any attempt at styling websites and going back on all readability best practices.

I see a lot of websites now which, in an attempt to reject all the nonsense, end up rejecting even basic CSS, and you are subjected to browser width text in Times New Roman with ugly blue underlined links (danluu.com is a good example. Such great content that I love to read but, to be honest, ugly). Surely there is a middle ground?

Something as simple as the following can make your website look neat and readable:

  body {
    font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
    max-width: 800px;
    margin: 0 auto;
  }
  
  a {
    text-decoration: none;
  }

Some very very minimal frameworks like Sakura attempt to do just that (https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura)

View on HN

> you are subjected to browser width text

Some of us consider it a feature that a website allows the reader to freely resize the browser window (and the text with-in) to the width they consider comfortable.

So if you want to use for example maps on one tab and read text on another, the best UX would be to have users resize their browser when changing tabs?

There are few reasons why a line of text should be longer than, say, 800 (css) pixels, but having the browser full screen might still be a good idea for more app-y sites.

I would use a different browser window for maps. Even with tabs, window maximization is usually one click away, so not that much of a hassle.

But I agree that I commonly see people having their browser window maximized all the time (on huge monitors, to a great waste of on-screen space). I think the fact that they became accustomed to that is an unfortunate consequence of modern web design.

Microsoft Windows enforced maximizing everything like that since the 3.x days. Every other OS tried to enforce not doing that - some taking it to an extreme! I recall when the "maximize" button in OS X was a "zoom" button that stretched the window vertically, but it'd only stretch a window as wide as the content demanded.

Of course, the Windows users whined and whined and whined about that until Apple decided to make everything go fullscreen super easily.

So anyway, I love seeing people use 34" ultrawides to browser websites with their browser window maximized. It's a ridiculous waste of space. XD

it's actually super easy to make a window take only half a screen in windows 8+ - move it to the edge of the screen. in windows 10, you can also move it to the corner to make it take 1/4th. shortcuts of win+left/right do similar things and also exist since win 8 at least.

now whether these people are aware of that and whether they say that having 2800x1200 window is fine for them is a completely different thing...

Those same shortcuts are definitely in Win 7. I'd guess they came from Vista.

It's all because with web applications, a browser becomes a (shitty) window manager.

> So if you want to use for example maps on one tab and read text on another, the best UX would be to have users resize their browser when changing tabs?

The best UX would probably for text and maps in this example to be in different windows, to be honest. But that causes other issues with the mental model people have about web sites. Still, having a website-provided width limit helps avoid a click or two required to split the site off and resize its window, at the cost of wasting huge amount of screen space.

Not sure what's the way towards a better UX, though. I myself like tiling window managers, in which I can efficiently position stuff with keyboard the way I like, but I understand this will be too complex for casual users. I also like grid window positioning, like http://windowgrid.net/ which I use on Windows, which lets me flexibly resize windows with the mouse while retaining a nice looking layout. I feel that a solution like this would be simple enough for regulars, too, offering them useful flexibility with little confusion.

You can still do that with some margin or padding to the text doesn’t literally touch the edges.

You can just resize the browser window. Then the content is flowed nicely. Or the reader views, which allow me to set up a nice formatting and theming best for me. Frankly if the reader view did not exist, I'd read a fraction of what I read online.

Also, those who make websites, just please be nice people and keep the underlines below the links. Why confuse the reader? Why impede quickly skimming through a page for interesting links? If they are ugly, they are ugly to you, that's subjective. I like them, and think they are part of the visual culture of the internet.

And then there are the evil guys who style some random stuff like links, but they're plain spans with color: blue and an underline... Least surprise is best surprise.

I, for one, appreciate going back to the HTML4 roots I grew up with, when the web was much more simple and fast, and could easily be navigated with the Lynx browser and your arrow keys.

Links should be blue and underlined.

HTML 4 is pretty modern. Do you remember Gopher?

> Do you remember Gopher?

Oh my yes. I even recently (as something of a joke) created a Gopher gateway to a web service.

I miss Gopher in a lot of ways. It was my first real experience with the Internet (via the public library). The signal to noise ratio was good, and I think the result of making some very strong assumptions / opinions on what a document client-server should do, and how it should do it.

I’d love to reimagine gopher for the 21st century—maybe with documents and document maps served up as S-expressions. But then I realize that making the document model more complex or flexible than it is could simply lead to a new webby mess.

Gopher is kind of a museum piece right now. It’s a shame, because I feel like it has value in forcing you to think through a non-shitty information architecture. The web offers such a higher ceiling, but all too often a much lower floor as well.

Yes, it was in use at the library my freshman year in college (92).

I ended up using https://elementcss.neocities.org/

Calling these things a framework seems like an exaggeration. I prefer to call them “a stylesheet”.

Sakura seems to be done by someone who's not too familiar with typographic conventions. The distance to a paragraph following a header looks to be the same as the paragraph preceding a header.

I personally think a better approach is to hand out fully un-stylized sites, and provide a recommended CSS for people to apply client-side. That way the client can adjust things more consistently to how they find it easier to read.

The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care.

My mum, my step-dad, my brother and his fiancee, my next door neighbours, my best friend and my worst enemy all have this in common: they go to a website and they want to see the content on the page. They don't care why or how, so they're never going to apply an optional CSS file, even in the unlikely event they understand what it is.

Sorry, that's not meant to come off as a brutal put-down: it's just the way most people are about the web.

It's a good point, but it's not a full counterargument.

Regular users don't optimize their work environment strongly, but that doesn't mean they don't care. And current situation is that full power over site layout is in hands of site designers. I believe this is a bad balance, and needs to be strongly shifted towards good and easily configurable defaults client-side. That is, I believe the situation will improve meaningfully for regular users if we could seriously dumb down HTML5/CSS - while responsible creatives will be saddened, the reality proves that the commercial web in general can not be trusted with so much power over layout.

>the reality proves that the commercial web in general can not be trusted with so much power over layout.

That's not a reality, though, that's an opinion. If we were to "dumb down" HTML5/CSS and remove degrees of creative freedom from authors in favor of centralized, client-side solutions, we would do so for everyone, not just the "commercial web."

A web where everything looks and behaves exactly the same is a web which is only interesting to a minority of people. That web would probably have never escaped academia and the world would be worse off for it.

100% disagree. People fundamentally understand the power of the web, even if they don't realize it. To be able to link/chat/discuss quickly, freely, and easily will still win out, and people will still use it.

Exactly. And if current wild west of web design tells us anything, is that users can endure any kind of look&feel because they ultimately don't give a crap about it, they want to do what they came there to do.

(Which makes the "web where everything looks and behaves exactly the same" better than the web where designers fuck with UX to get a fraction of a percent increase on an A/B test, because consistent interfaces are easier on the mind of the user.)

So what is the problem with that? Just because "normal" people don't care, doesn't mean they have to. If they want a plain-text file of data to read, let them have it.

> The problem with that approach is it will only appeal to power-users. "Normal" people just don't care.

They do care. They just don't know better, and even for us power users content wins over the container. But everybody is complaining about slow websites that don't ever load, and this is leading more and more to the flocking away from the web to the apps. IDK if this is a good thing or not, but sometimes I think that if web became again a web of documents and applications again applications (albeit castrated tbh), that's at least better than what we have ATM.

I read Dan's website in Firefox Reader View. It's great. I love the plaintext web but I agree some better default styling wouldn't hurt.

Text decoration none? Seems like a really bad idea, can't tell what things are actual links.

The links would still be blue, "text-decoration: none" will just remove the underline.

Of course, didn't think that one through. Yeah, I prefer that.

I don't like the underlines myself, but removing them will also make it difficult for people who don't distinguish well between blue and black.

I end up writing bits of custom CSS for many sites I use daily, mostly to alter font faces and sizes, padding here and there, colors, etc. I use the Stylish extension.

It would be great to have this assumed by web sites. They could offer several pre-made CSS versions, e.g. day and night, right via the user-side mechanism for choosing and editing styles.

Alas, this mechanism is missing by default.

Relevant if someone hasn't seen this: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Use em and rem, not px.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/29eqrk/web_des...

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/

I'd replace 800px with 55em.

I just use reader mode in Safari (yes I use Safari.) It creates a great reading experience and because of iCloud, I can pick up reading on my iPhone and the reading experience is identical.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with danluu.com, and thinking there is betrays a weakness in your design sense.

danluu.com looks great in my text-only browser. No Times New Roman, no blue underlined links. Maybe the problem is with your browser?

Meh I want information not design. I'll happily block any third party font in favour of what my native browser can do.

What's wrong with Times new Roman? I can read it just fine.

It’s not possible to separate form from content. You always get the information in some form, some design. Good design makes it easier to get the information.

Times was designed for a different world, I would say that modern typefaces designed for the web are easier to read on the screen.

Apart from that, different content works better in different typefaces.

What you despise is not design, I’d say. What you despise is bad design.

This makes me wonder if browsers could change the default font pages are served in or if the specs dictate the font, like they do for link colors.

https://ia.net/topics/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com