Rediscovering the beauty of text on the internet | Hacker News Reader

Rediscovering the beauty of text on the internet

cheapskatesguide.org

130 pointsColinWright55 comments

Text can be beautiful, but only if you don't go out of your way to make it less so.

This is a view of my entire screen when this page loads. https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3

That's decidedly not beautiful.

And while WCAG checkers all swear that both this site and the linked tilde.town pass text contrast guidelines with flying (* ahem *) colors, my eyes just cannot cope with trying to read the text on those backgrounds.

same, uMatrix > disable CSS

Thanks for the feedback. In trying to make the text look good in medium to small screens, I hadn't considered what the page could look like for people reading on a screen that is more than 1440 pixels across. I've modified the css file. Clear your browsing history and try looking at the article again.

Are you the author? Thanks for nice article, I always love to confirm my own opinions! I agree with ebg13, the presentation of your article could be a little more attractive. On a web made for reading there are few simple style rules I use for all text. 1st, I use a line-height of at least 1.5 because every browser's default line spacing is too narrow. (Quanta Magazine gets posted here a lot and I think their average line height is 1.875.) 2nd, keep column width to 100 characters or below (the article already meets this). And 3rd, keep background colors desaturated as to not distract from the most important part of the website: the text!

Yes, I'm the author. I try hard to accommodate as many browsers/apps/screen sizes/devices/reader preferences as possible. But given the large number of them, it is not possible to make every reader 100% happy. I've found that keeping things simple generally works well for most people. For those who want to leave comments about the problems associated with their particular approach to reading my website, I have given them a place to do so: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-b....

If you want to see an example of what (I and some others) think is a nice typographic layout for the web have a look at https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

It is what I used for my personal blog and I've liked it a great deal.

on a related note, walls of text are not particularly attractive. i'd suggest using a rule-of-3: sub-divide any sections longer than 3 paragraphs using sub-headers.

it also helps to sharpen the main throughline, and leave tangents in asides, tables/diagrams, footnotes, links, and similar (possibly even a popup in the right circumstance, like a definitional aside).

I agree that your screenshot is not very readable, but on the contrary, I think that if you make your browser window that large, you are naturally going to get text that's sized similarly.

Personally, I find the site readable --- and far better than a lot of others.

I don't like it either, but at least I can disable CSS. But I think for most documents, it is probably better to just write it without CSS. And then, it will already be optimized for whatever display they are using presumably; you don't have to make it one way for one user, one way for other, etc, which will never be suitable for everyone, anyways.

Many of us have been pursuing personal projects to breathe new life into old technologies:

Nick Black has been doing great work creating a successor to ncurses. He took the latest and greatest modern C++ / UNICODE development practices, and made it work really well for the old school terminal stuff from decades ago, which was easier said that done. https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses

See also Cosmopolitan, which is more focused on the use case: "All I want is stdio and math; how can I do that without all the breaking builds and broken hearts?" https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan

Please consider supporting us. These old technologies are widely supported and have stood the test of time. Any positive developments towards making them fresh again, is going to benefit both you and the technology community as a whole.

Can't say anything about Cosmopolitan, but I'm a huge fan of TUI:s, so notcurses is a great initiative.

However, a text-centric web doesn't have to be "old technology". With HTML5 and CSS3, pages can look and feel very modern indeed and still not use tons of JavaScript frameworks. And with just a bit of added care, things can work swell in TUI browsers, phones and "modern" browsers alike.

I agree that the web is an outstanding platform. Many things exist that command line programs are much better at doing, e.g. web serving, text editing, matrix multiplication, and relu. We need to know that PCs will continue to be an open affordable alternative, which continues to maintain backward compatibility as designed. Technologies such as WebAssembly and GPU interfaces are still too new and experimental for many of us to feel comfortable opening it up to every news website we visit. We need to know that operating system vendors will continue to feel comfortable allowing us to easily share simple open source programs that have access to things like Intel's new instructions.

Oh, I just meant that text-centric doesn’t necessarily mean it should be considered ”old”: plenty of nifty features of semantic markup and CSS can be utilized to make a ”plaintext” web page look and feel very contemporary. That excludes things like JS, WebAssembly, WebGL etc.

Plaintext and text are two different things. Plaintext generally means unformatted

This article makes some good points but it fails in one respect to follow it's own premises. It starts with a nice and funny but completely useless image. This might be a pet peeve of mine but I really prefer articles that get straight to the point and start with their main argument. For good examples see the blogs of Drew DeVault, Dan Luu or Gwern.

EDIT: Ha, I should not comment without having read the article thoroughly to the end. It indeed addresses this very point:

"You are no doubt aware that this article begins with a picture. The reason I include pictures in most of my articles is in the unlikely event that an average Internet user stumbles upon one, he will be less likely to leave immediately."

Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?

> Is there any hard data that the bounce rate increases if there is no image at the beginning? Are there good examples of pages where this image really ties in with and adds to the content that follows?

I don't think picture itself is the thing, human seek novelty and visual impressions come naturally. If you can afford to design each page to be slightly different and memorable you should achieve the same effect, if there is one.

I recently made https://neat.joeldare.com based on a few of my favorite "text only" examples from the web, although I wouldn't call them that.

I was with the author until he started ranting about why he doesn't vote in political elections anymore

I haven't read the whole article, but I'd like to add that I really love to see more simpler webpages. For many sites (e.g. news), text only would be fine.

In Thailand (where I live) I recently found a super-cheap internet subscription, paying about 1,00 USD (30 THB) per month [0]. Of course, this internet is really slow, not usable for modern sites / web apps like YouTube or Google Maps. But could be very decent if more sites would be trimmed in content to the bare essentials.

---

[0]: https://oilinki.com/blog/worlds-cheapest-mobile-connection-g...

Posting this comment because I didn't see it mentioned in the article. This is a wonderful collection of old text files: http://textfiles.com/

Thanks for this! I completely forgotten about the site.i remember those CDs with all the text files such as this, excellent.

I was recently wishing more articles on the internet were written like unix man pages: purely textual and structured.

Yes, I should think so, too. Use a subset of HTML, with no CSS, and using commands such as <H1> and so on to specify headings and so on. Will any browser have a "table of contents" menu that uses these headings to automatically generate a table of contents?

I love this idea. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing better than a well executed modern site with all the bells and whistles, but there is still the adage , just because you can, doesn't mean you should. People reading news, want just that, nothing more, well, I guess that is what I prefer.

A good stand-in for page quality to me is size of bodytext:total payload. I should analyze my own blog to see what that ratio comes down to, I'd hope it would be quite good.

While there are some truths in the article, many that I share, I think the author usually reaches to wrong conclusions from some true premises.

Text only websites, while revolutionary and nerdy, are not the solution. We need well designed websites, optimized and lightweight. Images and videos are incredibly powerful, attractive, and can give an incredible amount of information (the cat example is ridiculous), removing them makes no sense.

If you think too many people read gossip magazines and tabloids, don't blame the pictures and go asking for text only magazines and books. Blame the publishers chasing easy money, blame the education system, blame the amygdala... But not images.

Yeah, I think the author overgeneralises that videos are a bad medium for technical information. I watch a few channels with ML paper discussions and they are incredibly well made, maybe better than reading the paper itself for grasping the core message.

Yannic Kilcher - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew

Henry AI Labs - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHB9VepY6kYvZjj0Bgxnpbw

Something about the contrast between the pink and black makes this site unreadable for me.

The text is also cramped inside a small container that doesn't utilize my screen real-estate.

You’d think a website that was devoted to being mainly plain text would at least put a little effort into making the text more readable.

The beauty of "plain text" web sites is that with any decent web browser you can either turn CSS off, load your own CSS or switch to reader mode.

So, just make it the users’ problem?

You honestly think it's a problem to tap a single button on your phone or pressing Ctrl-Alt-R?

Of all the problems created by web and UI design, this isn't one of them.

You honestly think the users should load their own css?

I'm not the one you're asking, but... yes.

User stylesheets are even part of the standard. The fact that the most common (and maybe "oppressive") browser doesn't support them is itself a problem.

So when my mother wants to know how to do that, I can have her call you instead of me, right?

Doing that if one wants to is one thing. But to say we all "should" is another. Anyone who expects users to load their own css for every site they visit has lost his grip on reality.

If they want to, yes. That’s one of the points of CSS; someone might prefer certain fonts and/or colours for accessibility reasons, for example.

It’s a great way to empower users. A feature, not a ”problem”.

Yes, I sometimes do this with a lot of stuff. Also sometimes to get rid of animations, worthless popup messages, bugs in the CSS that the site provided, wasted space, too big fonts, etc. Sometimes just disabling CSS helps, but sometimes not. Even on here on Hacker News, I added CSS to make all comment texts black, and to add a dotted vertical line to the left of indented comments so that it is more easily to see which one belongs with which one.

Usually, if a web page doesn't already have a CSS though, then it is already good and I won't need to add one.

I actually want the ability to have "privileged" CSS commands which can only be specified by the end user, including meta-CSS.

It also manages to be unreadable with Reader view on iOS.

I've been thinking: what prevents a lynx-like desktop browser that effectively defaults to a Reader-Mode-only on all pages?

"to wish that the average engineer would suddenly begin to care about using his work day productively."

I know no one likes to hear this but if you must pick a pronoun for a hypothetical "average" engineer you should use "they" or "she" to help readers be more mindful of the unconscious bias in our field.

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