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Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

Oh dang, yeah. An extension that makes the whole web look and work like the default Mediawiki skin would be glorious. And _fast_.

I miss windows having borders. Just dug up a registry hack (obscene that such a thing was needed) to force win10 to have window borders again, because I keep ending up in situations where I honestly couldn't tell where one ends and the other begins.

They spent decades researching and building interfaces with visual cues, and we spent decades tuning our reflexes to them. Then some whim of fashion decided that hiding all those cues was "smoother", and I want to choke someone.

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That, and the density. I like desktop UIs to be dense. They don't have to be sparse with ample padding like on mobile devices since you don't poke your fingers into your monitor. Yet somehow, people keep designing desktop UIs as if there's a touchscreen or something.

It's basic typographic design philosophy around whitespace - your eye needs somewhere to rest, and narrow columns of text are just easier to read. I personally like ample padding and whitespace, and don't want wall to wall content that just looks like a jumbled mess.

I agree with these typography principles when they are applied to things that should be read from top to bottom and the entirety of the content actually consumed as a whole. There's just many circumstances that it is not appropriate and I would say an encyclopedia entry is not one of them. I want to be able to scan a lot of content without having to change pages to find where I want to start reading from. That and people are really abusing the modern typography principle to get me to scroll more and 'engage' rather than just convey the information in a nice way (most news sites and recipe sites are egregious) that I'm starting to get turned off by the style for the web even though it's based in good reasoning. For print it's still fine because you are also limited and also it's often a two-column layout which is still pretty efficient for scanning for key words or phrases while being easy to read. 'Above the fold' used to mean something but in current web so much content wants to apply these principles but also wants me to scroll ten miles get to the actual point of the content and it feels really disrespectful to me as the reader.

What is typographic around buttons, toolbars and other panes?

your eye needs somewhere to rest

There is a big difference between newspaper columns and web whitespace. The former are more or less uniform and easily seen (I’ve also read newspapers with explicit delineation of separate articles, and it was even better experience). The latter is just chaotic blobs of whitespace, which doesn’t usually even delineate or makes your eyes rest, it makes them lost instead. You can’t see structure, because it is so blobby. Whitespace should only surround the elements which are much more dense and “thicker” than it. Otherwise it will blend into them dissolving any structure.

> people keep designing desktop UIs as if there's a touchscreen or something

I think that also has to do with "more white space = more scrolling = more ads".

Reddit is a perfect example of this. When they "updated" their UI to the current one, they added a ton of extra white space which forced people to scroll longer, thus spending more time on the site and viewing more ads. They also use a ton of other dark patterns.

> I think that also has to do with "more white space = more scrolling = more ads".

When applied to the web, maybe, yes. But then there are desktop apps, and entire operating systems, designed this way.

I think it has something to do with the phones after all. Everything is "mobile first" these days (to a ridiculous degree — there's a large grocery delivery service in my city that is ONLY available through a mobile app, so they lost me as a customer), so designers have much more experience with touchscreen UIs. Desktop anything feels like an afterthought oftentimes. It's just easier to take a mobile UI, blow it up to a computer screen, or put it into a window, optionally add a dual-pane layout, and call it a day.

That, and the fact how many designers regard the result of their work as a thing in itself, an art piece to be admired, instead of merely a coat of paint on a tool that just helps people get their f-ing stuff done more efficiently and then gets out of the way.

Along with a tiny body font, the effect is to more or less force you to maximize the window to make the site usable -- i.e. commandeer your desktop. Squarespace was an "innovator" in this technique.

Any more details on that registry hack? I have been using RetroBar to have clear borders on taskbar and nostalgia. It doesn't have all actual features of windows 10 taskbar though.

Why not use Reader Mode? I love it and use it as often as I can

I love reader mode! It's saved the internet for me

Reader mode is nice when it works, but since it’s hueristics-based I find it often either misses important content like images and code blocks that should be included with the article, or includes text that shouldn’t be there.

Even if it selects all the right elements, syntax highlighting doesn’t work which is an issue for me since a lot of the articles I read involve code.

These are issues with every reader mode I’ve tried – iOS Safari, iOS/desktop Firefox, desktop Chrome.

I wish there were a standard CSS media type that sites could implement, like `@media reader`, to help specify which elements should be included and to support things like syntax highlighting.

I recently worked on implementing readability in my Hacker News client app and here's the resources I found most useful. Basically, if once designs their site following the correct structure, then it works correctly for both reader mode as well as accessibility. These are "standards" which sites are supposed to follow but they don't unfortunately:

A very long read but this covers everything:

> How to Section Your HTML

https://css-tricks.com/how-to-section-your-html/

These are specifically important for accessibility users.

Another short read:

> HTML5 sectioning elements, headings, and document outlines

https://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201103/html5_sectioni...

And you can use Markup Validation Service to validate and get tips:

https://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input+with_options

Check out the excellent answer by Christian Kohlschütter on how readability works:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3652657/what-algorithm-d...

>An extension

But... that's the opposite of what was asked for. Adding an extension adds more of the bad. A patch for Firefox reader mode would be better in my opinion since the web itself won't become better.

why does a different set of CSS make it _fast_?

It probably doesn't in this case, but there are cases where css can have significant performance implications. Different selectors take different amounts of time, various things can force re-laying out the page etc. Not to mention pointless animation.

The default MediaWiki theme is available, along with a handful of others, if you create an account.

The default mediawiki theme (vector) is also the default wikipedia theme (on desktop).

If you don't have an account you can add ?useskin=skinname to end of url to trigger different skins.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin... and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin...

I just used win+ arrow keys, never missed the resizing.

Whoa, I had no clue about these key-combos. So handy! Thanks!!

For anyone curious, MS has a useful summary of how this works here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...

No problem, I did it by accident, and you can also drag the windows to the corners and overshoot to have them, top is full, left and right is half that side, the link you posted mentions that, I am actually surprised you never accidentally discovered either. I have that in KDE as well.

Also, double-clicking on a top or a bottom edge will v-maximize window, or resizing a window vertically and overshooting at the top or at the bottom of the screen.

Thanks for giving me a name for this that I can search for to turn it off. There’s nothing more annoying in my day than when I drag a window from one monitor to the other, then the windows cuts it in half and sticks it to the side of my screen.

I never knew what windows called it before, so there was no way to get rid of it in settings.

> I never knew what windows called it before, so there was no way to get rid of it in settings.

The settings pages aren't that big. You could read through it all in 5 minutes. Did you look? I mean sometimes things are annoying and you just can't be bothered to dig around to find the thing that turns it off, but at least in this case, it's easy:

Settings > System > Multitasking > Snap windows

You can't possibly be serious.

Out of curiosity, I just opened Windows 10 Settings. I see sixteen top level options. I opened the first one and it had 16 submenus, the first of which is two pages tall and has 8 additional settings links from it. Of course, Control Panel is also a place it could be hiding, and it's even bigger.

So, no. One does not simply click on every single thing in settings hoping to find the annoying thing that Windows is doing today that you don't have a name for.

Typing "Snap Window" into search narrows it down to three, which makes it possible to accomplish.

Thanks again to the GP for enabling that.

I am serious. counting pages won't change how long it takes to actually understand where things are.

you don't have to read every last word... you are just trying to get a vague feel for what is in there.

takes 5 minutes, max.

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