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Comment by corentin88 | Hacker News Reader

This site is amongst the worst to navigate on mobile, whilst the design is quite unique.

but a new layout doesn't make this much easier to read. the writing style mirrors the site layout - it's more for the author's amusement than the benefit of the reader.

It's bad on desktop, too.

If I hit page down, it scrolls the size of the frame, and not my screen. The frame is taller than my screen, so page down scrolls more than a screen full. I would have to use arrow keys or the mouse wheel to read it.

I tried scaling the page down so that the frame fits on screen, but page down still scrolls too far, somehow?

Weird. Naturally it works beautifully on mine with two different browsers, though I'm not in the habit of using the page-down key. I'll have to investigate that one further, I guess.

Works as it should for me too, on desktop Firefox here. Site design and fonts are quite nice. People on HN often lament the death of the "old web", but when we do get a site handwritten and with a personality, they turn around and say it is not usable. The strength of humans is our flexibility. We're not computer programs that throw an exception the moment their api is violated and an unexpected input happens.

I couldn't stand reading past the first paragraph because it's that bad.

The ligatures (ﬆ etc) are also quite distracting.

I like these discretionary ligatures. They give a text character.

Just fixed that. It now accommodates cell width.

Unfortunately even on desktop, this is far from a nice experience... https://i.imgur.com/9oPlfkU.png

Just put the content on the page, with each section left to size itself based on however-much content is in it, instead of giving each section its own scrollbar at least?

It's somehow even worse now as the text takes up a third of the screen width and there's so much UI that doesn't tell you what it does.

Looking at your source code, any reason you're doing hand-rolled css, layouts, scrollable divs with main content, inline css?

I remember doing this 15 years ago.

Today this is a problem that was solved dozens of times, from Bootstrap, to Zurb and Tailwind - with productivity, accessibility and variety of devices and screen-sizes in mind.

Your website is unpleasant to use and scroll. It feels you're reinventing the wheel just for the sake of it?

I write my own css for my statically generated website (andrewzah.com). The problem with bootstrap etc is exactly that they’re aimed at being generic. They’re not specific enough to do what I want quite how I want it… and there’s the burden of learning them.

It’s a lot easier to start with a good, semantic html structure and come up with exactly the CSS that one needs, rather than continually fight a system aimed at no one in particular.

Not to mention the bloat of unnecessary CSS/JS that you don’t actually need.

I make my website hand-made too, but because I found those tools to take too long to set up exactly how I want or they're too bulky.

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