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Comment by reidrac | Hacker News Reader

I love it. Note that despite a good attempt to use the aesthetic of the time, some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout (I was in there in the late 90s and we used all the screen because the resolution on a 15" monitor -if you were lucky- wasn't that great).

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Modern sensibilities like narrow layouts are I feel like a massive downgrade compared to full-width (or almost full-width) layouts. If the user wants less text, they can just resize the browser window, it's simple. But with those layouts, the text takes up way more vertical space than what's needed, even if you have a large screen, leading to lots of scrolling.

HN has a good layout - there are some (quite small) margins but it otherwise uses most of your screen. More websites should follow this pattern, IMO.

There comes a point where the eye has trouble jumping to the start of the next line. It probably differs per style (space between lines, font, contrast, etc.), but long paragraphs will be troublesome.

Requiring the user to resize the window is not a great alternative, IMO. It feels cumbersome, and people with many tabs will hate it. And doesn't work on mobile devices.

Dunno, I feel the opposite way. It's comfortable for me to read one line for longer, then to jump to the next one. I think this is just "what you are used to" - I don't see how either are inherently better or more comfortable to read.

Brain prefers longer lines with less next-line jumps, but people are used otherwise, so they overwork their brain while trying to keep their eye muscles happy.

Where are you pulling this info you're stating like fact from? I can say for sure that it becomes harder for me to accurately jump to the next line of text the longer a line gets. Sometimes missing a line or starting the same line again even makes sense for a handful of words so it's not immediately obvious that I've messed up finding the start of the correct line.

Let me see if I can find the study I've read quite a while ago.

Will link or write another reply if I can succeed. I have no time to look at it right away.

This kind of thing has been an issue for long before computers. Typesetting in newspapers also needed to use line width constraints for better readability. That's why long newspieces are often split across multiple columns. I have never heard if someone who prefers one long line so that's interesting!

On sites with a long line length I will often pop open the dev tools so I can drag them across and squish the page without resizing the whole window.

If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in.

> If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in.

I wouldn't be so sure. It was common for a long time (and still is on older sites) and browsers never got that feature. They also haven't bothered with a dark/light mode switch even though that is a much simpler feature since the setting is already there.

I think the inclusion of the scroll wheel on modern mice helped fuel this trend. Scrolling was a lot more onerous when you only had 2 (or 1!) button mice, and you had to actually go navigate to the scrollbar in order to scroll (or switch to your keyboard and use the page up/down keys). The other thing in this vein that is annoying is when scroll bars are so small users don't notice the content in the pane they're viewing can scroll, and will then claim the content isn't there. It is -- you just have to scroll for it. But you can hardly be blamed for not knowing that, because some moron decided to play hide and seek with the content.

100% agreed. It also doesn't help how modern programs hide/minimise the scroll bar, so you can't accurately judge the size of the content and where you are in it.

> some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout

I prefer that be left to me to size the column for my reading preference, by setting browser size accordingly, though I appreciate a great many users browse full-screen at all times and designers need to account for that lest they be blamed for the users choices.

If you make users resize the browser window to make a single column of text comfortable to read then websites with multiple columns or sidebar will be cramped. Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference without also limiting the total viewport space so websites are left to make their own assumptions.

The design considerations for a single column and multiple are quite different though – no need to not do something for one because of the existence of the other.

> Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference

Many sites have an explicit dark/light mode toggle, either instead of or as well as respecting prefers-color-scheme. Perhaps a “constrain width” toggle could similarly be implemented.

> some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout

Yes, this is also horrible.

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