Replying to comments about our web page design
research.exoticsilicon.com
research.exoticsilicon.com
The 1980s theme was the only one I could stand, and the 1990s theme appears to be the same as the Tropical Days theme. All the ones with the background are essentially unusable for me.
It's their site, they can do whatever they want, but it's a bit silly to act like there's something wrong with anyone who has a problem with it. For example, in the default theme the yellow text (#FFFF00) with the pink highlight (#FF00FF) fails WCAG contrast requirements across the board.
Maybe the really don't care whether everyone has an easy time reading their site or not, and that's their choice, but I find the snark about it off-putting. It's not difficult to design a site that's easy for everyone to read.
> But anyway, most of the material published on our research website is also available in gemtext format via our gemini server.
Might be the only way I'd read this site.
Same. I think this is one of those things where they were having some fun, and then some people on the Internet overreacted with great hyperbole, and so they're issuing this response to those people, but I'm sitting here reading it and it feels aggressive, and I think, "Wait, what did I do? I'm just sitting here not bothering anybody", and it begins to feel like a low-level conflict. I think a lot of internet discourse is like that, unfortunately.
Of course, with such an obviously high skill at design implementation, they did plenty enough to be perfectly fine for most use-cases, so it's hard to be too hard on them about any of their choices. Everything works just fine. And to ignore complaints that ignore your design choices is a fine disposition, as well! No reason to bother with people who aren't interested in your vision and don't contribute.
But to snark about the complaints, as if there's nothing you could do better? Smacks of an aloofness that is an off-putting characteristic for an organizations purporting to do research.
Looks like we need to "seek professional medical advice"
Some sites have it in the address bar, but I've never found any documentation from MS that makes it clear how to ensure that it is always there.
It's so easy to make a site that is accessible - a blank HTML document with no CSS essentially is. It takes work to make a site that isn't.
>>Arghhhh! Your pages give me a headache, and/or eyestrain.
>Stop using the site immediately and consult a qualified ophthalmologist. Seriously, no static display on a modern and correctly adjusted VDU such as a computer monitor or phone screen should ever be inducing headaches or eyestrain in a healthy individual when properly used for reasonable time periods, and with sufficient breaks. If it is, you may have an underlying health condition which has otherwise gone un-noticed.
this statement basically implies that you have no intention of creating a website that is accessible to all users, and to all of those users with cognitive, vision, or neurological issues: "tough luck, go see a doctor!". Though I understand the goal here in terms of style and this page is indeed WCAG friendly enough in terms of some of the most obvious success criteria- this website is an objective nightmare for those with a variety of cognitive disabilities.
Yet another reminder of the overblown nature of UX/UI in general. Given the current push for accessibility, seems like "make the text accessible" should be the goal above all else.
The browser should default to your operating system’s default color scheme, text size, and font face, and no CSS. There should be a setting somewhere you can opt in to “let the web site decide these things.”
They do provide reasonable contrasts for all text on the page.
The text is a reasonable size.
Which is honestly better than most websites, especially technology sites.
That said, it would be nice if they supported readers though, or directly linked to their "gem text" (pure ascii) site. Putting blame on the browsers for the site's design choices is lazy.
There's a different kind of incapacity involved: incapacity to control your device and software to have them suit your needs. The reply assumes that user has no other option except to drool and stare at what website author chose.
unlike with the blind or low vision population, those with cognitive and neuro issues often aren't aware of assistive tech, often aren't familiar with the accessibility settings on their devices, and sometimes aren't even aware of the disability they are dealing with and are undiagnosed.
I am aware that the site is original for the sake of originality (slanted divs look awful on my system, too). However, the advice to stop and find out what is wrong instead of just keep doing what everyone is doing is pretty sane.
spotify, steam, epic and many more.
big diff between profit/trend driven design and philosophical/practical design.
font-size: min(max(1em, 1.3vw), 1.3em);
This is going to be the default font-size for all of my websites now (preceded by a fallback for maximum compatibility of course).
That's what the outer min() is for: it makes sure the font size caps out at 1.3em which usually translates to 16 x 1.3 = 20.8px, which is well within the recommended size range for prose anyway.
What that whole snippet does boils down to exactly what they said in the article:
> The main global stylesheet uses the browser default font size, smoothly scaled up to 130% on higher-resolution displays as the baseline for the body text of the whole document.
On a low-dpi screen, nothing changes. On a high-dpi one, if you haven't set your browser text size to something larger, this snippet saves you from tiny unreadable text. Also note that ctrl+ and ctrl- to zoom still work just fine. It's not as dramatic a change as the sibling comment said. You can try it out on their site to see for yourself.
Recommended by people who only read twitter-length content maybe.
> On a low-dpi screen, nothing changes.
Repeat after me: viewport width has nothing to do with DPI.
This absolutely does change the font size on large low DPI screens.
If you want to scale with DPI you don't have to do anything. CSS already does that for you by default. Even "px" is scaled by DPI in CSS.
> On a high-dpi one, if you haven't set your browser text size to something larger, this snippet saves you from tiny unreadable text.
Yes, don't do that. Respect the users settings as they are set or give up any pretense that you are doing so and just set reasonable fixed font size.
> Also note that ctrl+ and ctrl- to zoom still work just fine. It's not as dramatic a change as the sibling comment said. You can try it out on their site to see for yourself.
That you can fuck things up even worse does not make this "hack" good.
font-size: clamp(1em, 1.3vw, 1.3em);
I learned this from https://adrianroselli.com/2019/12/responsive-type-and-zoom.h...
Thanks for the tip on clamp() by the way, TIL.
This is a good write up of using clamp and fluid type
The only mysterious parts of the expression are how the em and wv units work.
I'm certainly glad they like what they've built. But it breaks a lot of design concepts that help with UX (some in micro ways that aren't really noticeable without the aggregate effect). The "max character width" is a really valuable thing for "readability". But why bother with learning design when you're using all of the TECHNICAL specs 'exactly as specified'. Why bother with design responsibility when you're already absolving yourself of technical responsibility ('it should not be our job to work around bad tech...').
Of course, the most galling thing is that they're not actually using the spec, as it is specified. Using `section` tags everywhere is inappropriate. They are meant to break up content in the `article` tag.
But, okay, whatever; you're going to cling to the spec but still ignore the parts of it you don't like. Fine. Like they said, it's not causing screen-reader issues, so who cares, right? Except that they ALSO don't use the `header` tag within those sections to denote what is clearly a header. Not a "heading" (h1-6, used for breaking up paragraphs in articles), maybe, since it's not in an article and that can cause funky screen-reader performance, but there's no reason to NOT use a `header` tag. This use case is literally what it was made for; giving a generic header that you can style and make accessible on your own. So why use a `section` tag erroneously, but then eschew using the `header` tag for the exact purpose you need? (why use it? screen readers/accessibility)
Nothing in this seems like "well-considered design". Rather it seems like "good enough, and how I like it." Which is a perfectly wonderful way to design and run a website! It's just kind of shitty to then go write an entire article telling anyone who misunderstands your uniqueness for a different flavor of uniqueness that you are actually doing everything exactly right and that anyone who dislikes your site should take their "problems" elsewhere. A fine enough attitude, if you're in to that kind of gatekeeping, but I've never found it compelling or endearing.
"Am I so out of touch?
No. It's the children who are wrong."
-Seymour Skinner, "The Simpsons"
That aside, yes, I was wrong to use it like "[...] in the `article` tag."; well spotted.
- On chromium cpu usage do not evolve but it is not animating the favicon.
If you want to disable it on firefox and are using ublock origin, you can do so by going to the ublock origin dashboard --> My Filters and add the following line:
||research.exoticsilicon.com/images/icon.svg
It’s kind of how so many LaTeX documents look the same because nobody bothers to design anything; the inverse problem from Word where things are too easy to change.
> It’s kind of how so many LaTeX documents look the same because nobody bothers to design anything
Another one is here: https://www.vistaserv.net/
The font rendering is especially impressive to me. You can read more about it here: https://www.vistaserv.net/blog/90s-fonts-modern-browsers
I wish we could go back to a WWW where the browser was the user agent and the user was the authority on text size, font face, colors and so on. Browsers have devolved from applications allowing users to browse hyperTEXT into these free-for-all canvases for web designers’ creativity.
Technically this should be solvable by using the browser’s “no styles” feature, but many web sites seem to be careless with the structure of their HTML such that “no styles” isn’t even readable.
I know this ship has sailed and my opinion is a fart in the wind at this point, but the web could have turned into a nice, fast, consistent way to publish structured and linked TEXT, but instead we got this “Remote Photoshop for Web Designers.”
This is still the case.
Your browser allows you to choose which font and size you want to use, as well as editing the css loaded on a tab and most browsers have extensions available to automatically load the css of your choice for a particular site.
The fact is that you choose not to use that freedom.
Here's the aspects that I personally enjoyed:
- Tropical nights: this feels like a pleasant theme on the eyes, almost like an IDE dark mode
- Nitrate memories: another theme that feels fairly readable, with the contrast being okay in *most* places
- Light pastels: this one dials down the colors a little bit so they're not as distracting
I'd probably just have a chuckle about the quirky design and go browse other sites that might have the information that I'm looking for, due to my eyes scanning them more quickly and easily, much like you'd look at data in a spreadsheet (sans annoying pop-ups and other dark patterns that web is plagued with). But you know what? Their website design is none of my business, it's fine for them to make their own choices and run it how they desire, even if some of the answers on this particular page are a bit on the nose.
Can't say whether we'd benefit from more or less of that, in general, though.
My first webshack internship had a nice website with like 20+ very slick early web designs folks could switch between. So cool.
There's the Css Zen Garden, a set of html elements to practice your design chops on. That was so the spirit of web design, highlighted so powerfully how bodaciously rad having html structured information & css styling as separate entities was, rather than as almost all UI toolkit do having the two concerns more intermingled. Zen Garden Forever. https://www.csszengarden.com/
The site's design is not to my taste -- but I seriously love that it doesn't look like almost all of the rest of the web.
Most of the web all looks the same. I applaud Exotic Silicon for pushing back against that.
However inventing something new is really difficult especially after the space of the ideas had been explored for a long time.
As for fashion, once you exhausted all the variations of the current fad you have to start again with an old one, with a twist. The result is that all those new web sites look old to me.
Exoticsilicon looks really old.
…well, almost every. Exotic Silicon is still at large, last seen in the vicinity of the 46 block.
Not a niche or hobbyist website, but a genuine car leasing company. Who's owner deliberately styled the site like this to act as a differentiator in a crowded market. It's certainly unique, I'll give them that.
Sometimes marketing is so bad it’s good
https://research.exoticsilicon.com/terms
First I’ve seen that.
Our brains are artificial intelligence? Humans are machine learning?
I mean, c'mon. If humans are artificial, then what do you call real? If humans are machines, then what on earth isn't?
No, they could not. Even if they did, those things are just different. It won't change what AI/ML is, a bunch of bytes in memory and on a disk. Just making a bunch of reaching comparisons, won't absolve AI/ML of responsibility.
Hum... Not really. They are modeled after our periferic nervous system. Detailed knowledge about the brain wasn't very available at computer science departments at the time they were created. Besides, they have a much "cleaner" design that would win the computer scientists esthetic preferences every time anyway.
Are you aware what "organic" means? Have some imagination. We can call it OI and OL to make it a bit easier if you want.
I am, but I always get an argument when I tell certain people that "all food is organic", despite the fact that's technically correct.
I have no idea who "exoticsilicon" are or if they read HN but if they do, free-for-life rsync.net accounts for any of them that care to contact us.
I am already making good use of this particular piece of content:
https://research.exoticsilicon.com/articles/lte_ethernet_bri...
And yes, I realize I just upset many sensibilities here.
Having a large window should be telling the site "you have this space, make the best of it". Maybe it would be nice to have a built-in CSS property for "desired reading text width" but I think most people can pick a number and it is generally good for most readers.
> Having a large window should be telling the site "you have this space, make the best of it"
I 100% agree but I interpret this in reverse: if I made my browser window gigantic I expect you to use it. If I make my browser window small I expect you to responsively shrink.
The reason this doesn't happen is that it's pretty hard to build layouts that work across all these different screen sizes. That's generally why you get mobile/tablet/1600x900 desktop layouts and that's it.
---
I suspect this is another consequence of the app vs. text tension on the web. Apps are great to fullscreen: you want Spotify or Figma to take up the whole window. You don't want a single sentence to unfurl entirely horizontally. But there's no way to say, "I'm the kind of user who sets the browser window size to as much as you can use, so use it all" or "I'm the kind of user who wants you to center your text elements and take up at most 1600px of space even when my browser window is using 3800px."
I don't. I never use my browser full-screen, but I do size it in whatever way makes it work with whatever else I have going on on my desktop. Usually, this is a very small window.
If that makes a site unusable, and if the site isn't essential, then I just move on to a different site. I'm not going to rearrange things just to accommodate the whims of some random web designer.
For folks complaining of headaches or eye strain, browsers come equipped with forced-colors mode that enable you to choose your preferred color scheme.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Ooer/ best viewed on desktop
Enjoy it's luscious overdrive.
Have you tried that thing Bionic Reading it could be interesting for people to just digest the text further and quicker if that is the end goal but anyway its interesting I really do like it to be honest
Not everything needs to be hard and not everything needs to be dull.
nothing progressive about this design. just call yourself peculiar instead of giving this veneer of betterment
A leader in the clubhouse for the Accidental HN Slogan of the Year award.
> Since admitting that you didn't realise the theme selector was there would make you look silly in front of people you don't even know
The theme selector is a link in the footer. It's probably the most subtle thing on the entire page. And it's not like they're using the rest of their real estate efficiently. I think it's fair to infer they prefer people don't realize they can change the theme until they've been annoyed.
The first prominent mention of themes is a heading six screenfulls down that mocks you for not changing it. It doesn't tell you how to change it.
This site is an explosion of emphasis. They can use massive size and gradients and flashy colors to emphasize their mockery of me. If they choose not to use the same for their theme switcher link I think it's fair to infer they don't want to emphasize it.
People who complain about offbeat-but-still-readable web design are killjoys who indirectly contribute to the sterility of the modern internet.
However, it is not the most accessible of websites and I certainly wouldn’t want to have e.g. Wikipedia be designed like this (oof), but I don’t mind the occassional quirky rebellious web design adventure.
This is like saying, we want to make our site progressive, so we'll embed a bunch of things in a magic eye, and the people reading can do free-viewing for that steroscopic effect.
Nevermind the simple fact that roughly 10% of the global population is color blind and as a result will biologically never be able to see it if the colors are wrong.
I think they channel the feeling quite well
> Websites in the, (late), 1990s were characterised by many things, but a typical list might include:
> - Serif fonts
This 100% felt like more playful teasing. At the expense of those who refuse to have a good time, who can't roll with it, who let themselves be tattered by tiny things.
It just going on and on and on just keeps highlighting how in depth & considerate & thoughtful they really are & keeps bringing out the joke more, about how hilarious & fun it is & how great it is to have such an amusing conversation piece.
This page is their moment of glory, a secret shrine to how awesome they are. The hurf-burf "this isn't 90's web design!" being way over precise & technical about the matter was a hilarious example of them just being here to have fun & be smart about shit.
That page doesn't read to me as playful or fun, it reads to me as angry and bitter. Although I understand (now) that's not what they were going for, I can't make my brain read it any other way.
And it's not like they have particularly bad points either. They're over the top but basically counter-roasting far more over the top griping, for the most part. It's all pretty well constructed. I don't think they cause any additional or excess damage with this.
I don't always think shiboleths or in-comments are wise, but here in particular I think it adds greatly. It's almost entirely just people's disposition & response we see for how folks perceive this, and not at all cultural or information based. The context in question is mostly the reader themselves. This continues to parlay the grand-joke about emotions & people well, to me.
I will admit, though, that that particular page put me off. It's just so hostile that it clearly says that I'm not welcome there even though I do agree with the substance of what they're saying. So I haven't looked at the rest of the site, and I don't even know what the site or the company is about.
I'm sure that they couldn't care less about me, though, and rightfully so.
if i really feel i need the info and de-styling wont work, then i read the source.
if to no avail, i go elsewhere.
You mean I'm not the only one who does this?? I think I end up doing that on about 25% of the websites I hit.
So they’re saying that they’re aware that their website is inaccessible to some people with certain health conditions, and they don’t intend to do anything about it.
That’s like if a grocery store with a staircase at the front door put up a sign that says, “If you have trouble climbing these stairs, consult your doctor. No person with healthy legs should have trouble climbing these stairs. You may have a health condition.”
I mean, thanks for the advice, but you’re still excluding people.
It’s supposed to be fun. Many fun things “exclude” people. Sports for instance. Music. Painting. There might be accessible versions. There are also inaccessible ones that trade off artistic expression over other factors. The internet is a big place. There’s room for all of it.
In general, courts tend to follow not just the letter of the law but also the intent, so it's better to go on the safer side.
There are an infinite number of possible disabilities. Most disabled people already have tools to accommodate.
If you can't see little things, you can zoom. If you have issue with poor contrasts, you can configure your display and/or your browser and/or your OS. If you can't see anything, you can use screen readers. If you have issues with low contrasts, you configure your computer or your browser to override contrasts.
Being "accessible" doesn't mean that your website have to think about every possible disability and that you have to provide a solution. It means that you use decent defaults styles but above all, it means that your website continues to function when it's degraded by the user agent.
Someone with eyestrain issues will not hate you because you made a bad color choice for his disability. But he will probably hate you if him changing the colors or the zooming ratio renders your website unusable.
edit : Also I have strong issues with contrasts due to amblyopia + astigmatism and this page was a pleasure to read. Black on light gray with slight font shadow is exactly what my eyes need.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/font-contrast-fi...
- https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/darkreader
Or anything that can change or override the default browser style-sheet. Be it yourself if you are technical savvy enough or a tool.
It can also just be your monitor settings if it suits you.
If you are there for the content and not the design, then it works fine with a browser like Lynx. Thus all the content is entirely accessible.
https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/mediaqueries-5/#mf-user-p...
The website can both have a shrill design and be accessible at the same time.
Accessibility doesn’t mean everything should be available to everybody at all times. That would be universal direct accessibility, which is impossible. Those without the internet or computer access cannot use a grocery website, but the grocery store is still open, and thus the groceries are still indirectly accessible. Providing an elevator as well as stairs means the 2nd floor is universally accessible, even though some cannot use the stairs.
Here, the content is provided by default with an unusual design. That design is part of their brand experience, which is why it has been posted. Some people cannot view through that experience, but they can still reasonably access the content using assistive technology. Thus the website is indirectly accessible.
Remove the design and you make the experience inaccessible to me. These are trade offs, not absolutes.
You’re assuming. It’s probably not a good idea to base one’s website’s accessibility strategy on such assumptions. Headaches and eyestrain are a real problem for many people. For example, people turn on dark mode because they have trouble looking at white backgrounds late at night or early in the morning. The same rule probably applies to bright colors.
> Remove the design and you make the experience inaccessible to me. These are trade offs, not absolutes.
I don’t think trade-offs are necessary. The website can have a shrill design and be accessible at the same time. For example, if the website was compatible with the browsers’ reader modes, then users could view the site in a simple black and white design.
They're going to keep the design. I'm going to be happy about that. You're not.
FWIW, the law says yes. And the law is right, IMO: we should not deprive a minority of their rights just because the majority is fine with the status quo.
And everyone will become disabled if they don't die young. Eyesight in particular is pretty much guaranteed to decline with age.
> ...requires federal agencies and any institution that receives federal funding to make electronic technology and information equally accessible for individuals with disabilities. This means that an organization's website must have all features just as accessible for individuals with disabilities as these features are for individuals without disabilities. For example, it must be equally easy for an individual with a disability to find information about an organization's services on their website as it is for non-disabled individuals to access this information.
This is an American law, but obviously other countries may have their own equivalents.
1. https://acs-web.com/digital-marketing-lexicon/section-508-of...
I don't think that website is either a US federal agency or receives any US federal funding.
IMHO it's hard to tell either way, because their website wasn't designed with ease-of-use in mind.
That said, here's some facts I was able to gather on their business:
> Whilst IT research remains our primary focus, we now offer executive high-end commercial IT services to organisations with unique problems to solve.
> ...we also have a large body of knowledge of older systems, many of which have now gone full-circle and fallen into disuse, technology that has been abandoned and forgotten. We occasionally do projects involving those, especially when nobody else seems to remember how they worked. Our knowledge-base includes legacy programming languages such as Fortran, data conversion from obscure file formats, and even assembly language coding on various platforms.
Based on these quotes, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that they have clients in government.
Anything is possible, I suppose, but everything I've seen on that site leads me to think it's not a company at all, but a personal hobbyist's website, or perhaps that of a hobbyist club.
From ada.gov:
> The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in everyday activities.
And specific to web sites:
Restating the post I originally responded to:
> Should the vast majority of the world who do not have those health issues be deprived of its glory, because there is a minority who - very sadly and unfortunately for them - cannot look at it?
The key words from the comment are: "cannot look at it"
For comparison, some other similar discriminatory phrases from history: "cannot swim in it", "cannot drink from it", "cannot ride on it", "cannot enter it", "cannot buy it"
Just as a non-wheelchair accessible store is an example of discrimination, even if someone in a wheelchair could conceivably gain access to it by dragging themselves up the steps with their arms.
> Why don't you take legal action against them?
Because I'd honestly rather they do the right thing for the right reasons. Lawsuits should be a means of last resort.
And honestly, I'm not rich enough to fund a legal campaign. I'll leave that to someone with more money than I.
There is absolutely no legal requirement to either spend a fortune on designers, or reduce your website to some boring text-only mush, in the name of "accessibility". The website in question is accessible via a screen-reader, but even if it wasn't, they are not in a market where broad accessibility would be considered a legal requirement. If that were the case, half the websites on the internet would be taken offline.
If you did take this to court, you would lose.
Since you quoted and responded to it, it seems you are in agreement with the site authors. There are 10 themes. do all of them make any one person's eyes bleed?
The author of that website claims that they’ve seen multiple comments that complain about headaches and eyestrain. This is the first item in the FAQ, which suggests that it’s one of the most common complaints.
> There are 10 themes. do all of them make any one person's eyes bleed?
The theme selector is at the bottom of the page. It’s unlikely that a person who gets a headache/eyestrain from the design will find it in time.
People post all kind of things online, especially hyperbole. As one of the other FAQ questions notes a lot of people also complain about their eyes bleeding, but this has never actually happened.