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Comment by alternatex | Hacker News Reader

A good sized readable font is a bit funny though. That line of text is very small on my phone and I presume most people today browse on phones. I can also imagine some phones with a higher resolution show this text even smaller making it completely illegible.

I'm all about minimalism so long as it doesn't hurt UX but these examples of minimalism always end up going too far. It's like it becomes a competition for minimalists - "look how much more minimal I am than you! Therefore I'm a better minimalist."

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In my minimal blog I use this, it seems to be working pretty well on a wide range of devices:

    /* styles.css */

    html {
      max-width: 70ch;
      padding: 3em 1em;
      margin: auto;
      line-height: 1.75;
      font-size: 1.25em;
    }

There are other styling bugs: on an iPhone, there’s no vertical space between a subhead the content below as well, and there’s too much space between a para and a bulleted list.

Why not be minimal in implementation, too, and just use default styling? Don’t fear Times New Roman…

Ah, yes, and my favorite: white text on a white background. Default to defaults.

Interesting, I'm also on my phone (Pixel 6) and I found the text on the site to be somewhat too big. Sounds like it's different for some reason?

But I agree, I don't think this website is revolutionizing readability by being extremely plain.

Interesting considering the Pixel 6 has 403 PPI and my phone Nothing Phone (1) has 402 PPI. So almost identical in that regard. Maybe it's a browser difference (Firefox here).

This page was created almost twelve years ago. Mobile phones were not the main way to consume pages at that time for most of the world. I think even meta viewport did not yet exist back then.

Looks good on my iPhone 11

Apparently the iPhone 11 is 324 PPI whilst my Nothing Phone (1) is 402 PPI. Probably why it looks bigger to you, but I still wonder whether it would look good on your phone to a person with less than good eyesight. In any case, readability shouldn't depend on the user device. There are plenty of ways to get responsive font sizes in CSS.

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