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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read:

    font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif;
    font-size: small;

From an article that expressly advocates not making things hard to read: "Avoid excessive parenthesized remarks as they make the text hard to read;"

View on HN

the font size isn't ideal, but I find the line width to be a far larger problem.

a traditional book will have around 70 characters per line [1]. by contrast, on my screen (13" M1 macbook air at default screen resolution and browser zoom), suggestion 5 has 231 (!!) characters on its first line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length

"Internet Explorer is a popular web browser. The current version number is 5.0." might explain it.

Hmm. IE 5.0 and IE 5.5 were released in 1999, so perhaps the first version was written then. I also see a citation from 2015, which is a strong signal this was edited in or after 2015.

Font size looks fine to me on Firefox/Android.

The first version on the Internet Archive is from 2001, where the design made sense more or less, and it hasn’t changed much since then.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011225094629/https://www.cs.co...

Yes and the doctype is "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">", and there's inline style at "<body bgcolor=white>". Even though the footer says "last updated 2021" and there are links dated 2015, I suspect the page is otherwise unchanged from its initial late-90s/early 2000s design.

> Avoid excessive parenthesized remarks as they make the text hard to read

chuckles nervously in Lisp

*chuckles nervouthly*

Maybe it's the nesting that's the problem? Like, refactor it out into its own function/paragraph?

You're saying this on a website that I need to manually zoom in to 200% in order to remotely read the text.

HN uses a font size of 14px, that's only slightly smaller than most browser's baseline of 16px (Vs. 12px for small). By any chance are you reading it on a 4K display?

In my opinion, HN and most websites, shouldn't be setting a baseline font size at all (least of all in pixels). Medium/default should be the baseline then large/larger etc should be used as-needed.

it's smaller than most other websites and for me on a 1080p display top level comments don't wrap until ~200 characters at the default zoom level which makes it even worse

edit: also for me the font size is set to 12, not 14

- Too small on a 13" MacBook Pro (2019) - Too small on a 15" MBP (2019) - Too small on a 32" 4K BenQ desktop monitor on Windows.

Verdict: too small.

Because they have better things to do than tinkering with the latest HTML technology.

  font-size: 1.2rem;

that is considered the latest HTML technology?

A lot of sites haven't kept up with best practices. Even HN doesn't (I'm on mobile so I can't double check, but last I did HN uses "pt").

I have grown to like it. I found it really perplexing like you but now I view it as they just want to present their information in the rawest, most simple way possible. I was been inspired by it when I made my personal website, however I added some responsiveness etc to increase the usability a bit.

It's because they spend most of their days reading PDFs, so they make websites look like PDFs on their screens then publish it.

Those who don't know...

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