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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Side note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?!

I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable.

This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen.

When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong.

Is it unreasonable to expect body text on the web to be roughly the same size as the body text used in my computer's menus and dialogs? Obviously those should already be set to the ideal legible size, so what is with these blogs deciding to choose mega-sized letters instead??

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Agreed. I prefer that default text be left default size. On some device I may set the default size higher for ease of reading (ex hidpi screens), but let me decide that... not the website.

It actually looks fine on my mobile.

An overreaction to the earlier, and still more common, trend of setting body text too small? (take the very website you're on, for example)

Agreed. I built this Daily Journal app and just been hacking on it for the last couple months. I'll bring the text size down a bit soon.

Made it smaller. Lmk if that looks better?

The beauty of web clients is that you can control the font size if it looks bad on your device.

I don't think it's possible on mobile. Yesterday I found myself needing to adjust the font size on rateyourmusic.com's responsive site, and it wasn't possible. On a desktop it's as simple as "CTRL +" but that doesn't exist on mobile browsers.

Fennec Textwrap addon for Firefox on Android will slightly improve pinch zoom text reflow.

It’s quite easy on iOS Safari. Top left “aA” icon, then pick your zoom.

I already do, for what is the average body text size across mainstream sites.

There's nothing beautiful about individual blogs choosing text sizes wildly outside of the mainstream, so that I have to adjust my zoom on them individually. That's just an annoyance.

I personally love this trend. It's one of the first sites I've been on in a while that I didn't have to bump up everything to a readable size.

Serious question: why don't you increase the size of text on your OS as a whole? Or browser default zoom at a minimum? If you're having to bump up the size individually on most sites, it seems like the problem is that your computer is misconfigured, no?

Regardless, the point is that it's important for body text sizes to be roughly consistent across sites, so that you can find the zoom level that's right for you and stick with it, rather than have to adjust it for each new site.

Agreed.

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