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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the content (which is fantastic), this is one of the most graphically pleasing blogs I have come across in a long time.

* Clean design. No loud colors, animations, popups or clutter.

* Sensible CSS usage. Good colors, contrast, margins.

* Large text size. I don't know why so many sites (including HN) mess this up. I don't want to have to magnify a site 3-4x just to read the text from a reasonable distance.

* Rich content when needed (images, GIFs, video embeds), all serving to complement the writing rather than getting in the way.

* Reads very well on mobile devices.

* Loads quickly.

Sites like these are a perfect response to many different sides of the web design debate – including those who preach that plain HTML with six tags and no CSS/JS is the only acceptable answer for a functional website.

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The fonts are way too big.

The answer to your problem is for you to increase your default zoom level to a comfortable level, not for individual web sites to use non-standard big font sizes.

I disagree about the text size. Completely. HN, like other sites, uses a font that's approximately the same size as other text on my screen. User interface elements, command prompts, text editors, ... . Essentially everything has that same approximate size.

Is that not the case on your system? Or if it is, why do you want websites to have a larger font than other text on your screen?

Oh hang on, I see you mention mobile devices. I was assuming reading on desktop. Yeah, that's a different matter. I can see how the text on HN is too small on mobile devices. It's easy enough to make the right size for both mobile and desktop though, I would think.

I agree. One additional detail to notice is the use of horizontal space. There are several different widths being used, depending on the type of content. (I'm on desktop.) I like the varying "full-width" image sizes, as well as the footnotes on the side. But most exciting to me is how the content gets wider for side-by-side image and text components, such as the early MS-DOS CLI screenshot. This component uses the extra horizontal space that it needs to, while maintaining flow with the rest of the writing above and below it. It's elegant and I believe it's an innovation. After experiencing this post, the typical blog or article layout crammed into a fixed-size column seems straitjacketed. It's inspiring.

You forgot the gorgeous hand-drawn illustrations. Maggie's website convinced me to make my own illustrations on my website too.

Something weird going on with my phone's webview. The site jumps around constantly, making it unusable. Looks like the superscripts and their hidden references constantly re-render. Can't debug cos webview.

Works fine in Android Firefox though.

> Sites like these are a perfect response to many different sides of the web design debate – including those who preach that plain HTML with six tags and no CSS/JS is the only acceptable answer for a functional website.

For what it's worth, it breaks Dark Reader.

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