Ask HN: Why letter-spacing of small fonts is still rare on the web?

Increasing tracking of smaller fonts makes them much more legible. The modern web design uses a lot of white space, so there's rarely a penalty for doing this.

Go to a website, open developer tools, select a text which is smaller than body copy and add this style:

    letter-spacing: 0.05em 

(Or reduce to 0.02em if the font is on the larger side).

It makes a lot of difference! Especially applied to text set in all caps.

I've seen tracking used extensively on Apple websites, which I guess is not surprising given their design roots.