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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

My initial take: I actually like this a lot. The body text is narrower which makes for easier reading. The sidebar with an updating highlight of current place in document is really nice too. I don't mind the "wasted space": Wikipedia is primarily about reading, and any well typeset book or web page should have generous margins so the line length is not too long.

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My first take: it’s different so it sucks. The lack of visual separation between the main content and the menu on the left is atrocious.

Second take: oh wait, the menu in the left was completely useless and they replaced it with the table of contents for that particular entry. That’s actually a welcome change. I’ll get used to “different so it sucks” soon enough anyway, that’s my fault not theirs.

It’s kind of fascinating when you catch yourself having knee-jerk reactions and “watch” your brain correct them.

I find so much whitespace to the left tries to grab my attention and makes it harder to focus on the content.

It says something about how we've (all) been trained to read the web that you find an empty margin more distracting and grabbing of attention than the previous thing that occupied that area of the screen -- a fairly useless list of wikipeida navigational links we had all learned to ignore.

I've been using Redirector for the last few years to redirect Wikipedia links to the mobile site because the interface is so much cleaner and the content so much easier to read. I'm super excited about this change because I can finally get rid of that browser extension.

I have been using a user script to do just the opposite, because the interface is so much poorly delineated and the content much harder to read.

I guess I'll be modifying it to plaster ?useskin=vector at the end of every link as well...

I was worried about the narrow body impact on table data since wikipedia often has the most concise charts for comparison. Although the styling looks broken, at the least the data isn't hidden inside an inner scroll area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series?useskin=vect...

For 16:9 screen sure, old wikipedia is too wide but I use side tabs in browser so my browsing area is closer to classical 4:3 monitor and the old one fit very well (for me) on that.

I find the old width fine. The font size was too small, I adjust that locally, but the length was ok.

Why not just have multiple columns of text instead of half a screen of emptyness and stuff users rarely interact with?

You could arrange the different wiki sections to be side by side.. in a dynamic responsive way depending on device/screen size

I find multicolumn on digital screens especially in the browser to seem very clunky.

And with an arbitrary article length, multicol would require pagination, right?

Do you have any examples?

I see some examples on MDN:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou...

I imagine there are a few ways to do it. I'd just have columns break at section headers. It'd also jive well with the wiki pic/quick-info right hand sidebar that's common

Text width is important, but this is not a solution, zooming and changing browser window geometry is.

Mac OS (and some linux desktops) seems to really expect you to manage windows by having them always be full screen and swiping between desktops. Which makes changing browser window geometry sub-optimal.

Even on desktops where it's reasonably easy, it's pretty annoying to have to resize the window when you go to different sites to get them to format properly.

> Mac OS … seems to really expect you to manage windows by having them always be full screen and swiping between desktops. Which makes changing browser window geometry sub-optimal.

That hasn't been my experience at all, in fact for me macOS works better when windows are mostly sized to fit their content. Windows and Windows-like Linux DEs is where I feel pressure to maximize everything.

I agree. Anecdotally, I also see more PCs with maximized windows in the wild, and more Macs with smaller windows. (I don't really see many people using Linux in the wild.)

Interesting.

I'm curious if you're seeing this on desktops? My sample of mac users is very heavily biased towards laptops (and I've only used macos on a laptop) - but I've seen the exact opposite.

Desktops and laptops. I do see more Mac users with maximized and/or full screen windows on particularly small laptops.

(And I'll note that in my own usage, when I'm on my 11" Macbook Air I full screen most apps. But that's a weird edge case due to the screen size.)

Considering how the macOS maximize button works I’d wager this dichotomy is at least partway intentional by Apple, to stop you from falling into the Windows habit of “maximize everything even if it means half your screen is blank”.

Agree, and this is one of the things that infuriates me with macOS. The new "Settings" app can't even be maximized horizontally anymore.

I have a 4K monitor and I have Wikipedia at 200% zoom at all times. It works fine and I prefer it to the alternative.

It's not necessarily a function of the linux desktop. I use xfce, but it would be entirely easy to work with non-full-screen windows for my browser, emacs, clementine etc. However, I choose not, and use workspaces to spread things out.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but it is wrong for me. I have a browser with say 8 tabs open. When I switch between tabs, I don't want to have to keep resizing the browser geometry.

But zoom is only for the current tab, so no need to keep resizing

Increasing zoom to reduce words per line is a hack though. Why would I want to read Wikipedia in a larger font than I read other websites?

I'm sorry, but zooming is just... dumb... at least for me, sorry. Having a giant text doesn't help the readability - at least for me :( And it's not like changing window size only when visting Wiki is a good solution too - it's nuisance to change window size when you came for a quick 30 second read. At least for me.

Plus if I change the browser geometry, that messes up the other pages I have open in other tabs. Not to mention the other apps my TWM manages.

Accessibility is individual. I'll be reading Wikipedia articles at 200% now, like I do for virtually all one-column layouts. And this Wikipedia layout has good responsiveness, so no worries.

You could also just log in to an account and set your own theme. My account is still one the 2005 theme as it works best for me.

I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. As it stands, I think the new design is a much better default for most people.

Also, zooming and changing browser window size is, while only a keystroke away, isn’t something I want to do just to make a site that should be optimized for reading text more legible. It should just default to that way.

In short, I’m sorry this doesn’t fit your flow. That’s frustrating. But I think this is a better design. Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography seems to support this view. [1] (MB is a lawyer, typographer, and Racket programmer for those not familiar with his work.)

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html#on-the-web

> I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it.

How? Seriously, if you have a way to do this that works for pages in general I'll be extremely grateful. I tried using a user stylesheet that said * { max-width: 100% !important } for a while, but that breaks too many non-root elements on all sorts of sites.

Whereas making the page narrow when it doesn't set a max-width seems very easy to do with a custom stylesheet.

I don't do this personally, so I'm fuzzy on the details. I know of no way to make this work in general (how would you do that?) across sites, but Wikipedia pages follow a consistent format, so that shouldn't be too hard. Furthermore, someone[1] here on HN showed how you can control how the theme works.

My point: if you care that deeply about how Wikipedia in particular is laid out, you likely have the tools to force it to work that way. Meanwhile, the rest of us plebs get a better (from a typographical standpoint, not necessarily a case-by-case basis) default.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431533

If you create an account on Wikipedia then you can go into preferences and define custom CSS styles.

I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a new style and open the editor in a new tab and then add your CSS and hit save. You can also search for existing styles for your current website that have been published online.

You can have one style apply to multiple domains, I have a simple one for making text black and setting the font size and line spacing which works on a dozen sites or so. You can even use SCSS or Stylus instead of plain CSS if you want.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

> I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a new style and open the editor in a new tab and then add your CSS and hit save.

Yes, I'm talking about that kind of thing. It's trivial for people who want narrow sites to put a max-width on the root element that way. As someone who wants wide sites, how do I do undo all these designers' narrow widths without having to figure out manually what each individual site has done?

I use the dev tools to find the containing element with max-width by using inspect, clicking on the text and then finding which ancestor has the width, and then it's something like

    div.article-text {
      max-width: unset !important;
      width: 100% !important;
    }

which works in most cases. It's totally a pain to have to do on a new site, but once it's done then you never have to do it again - at least until the website does a redesign lol.

Not all uses of Wikipedia are the types of reading supported by works and research in long-form reading. Hell, many, many Wikipedia articles aren't long-form, and paragraph text is a minority of content on some table-heavy articles.

The issue isn't with width but a lack of user preferences, logged in and not. You don't need user accounts, cookies, persistence, or frankly even Javascript to change the content width on an article. The skin designer can set the best practice for a contrived ideal use case as the default, and still let anyone with other use cases expand the content's max-width to fill more space.

EDIT: Looks like they added one — there's now a "Toggle limited content width" button now appearing for me in the bottom-right corner of the wider desktop views.

What an absolutely absurd thing to say.

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