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Comment by foo12bar | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.

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Isn’t he just serving up the desktop website? This goes along with the original intent of the benefits of the browser on the iPhone. It was able to run the normal Internet, not a separate “mobile” version of it. I found a simple double tap on the text sized it perfectly fine to read the text.

What I find to be a UI problem are sites that force me into a mobile view, which often loses features, and which removes my ability to zoom and pan as I wish. Apple had to add an option to “Request Desktop Website”, which I assume spoofs the user agent, to try and get around this issue. But for site that use other means, this still doesn’t work and the user is locked into a crippled mobile page… the exact problem modern smartphones were supposed to solve.

I’ll take Gruber’s model every time over the crippled mobile sandbox with no way out.

Whatever the reason is the fact is: his website is unreadable on mobile.

I've been using firefox's viewport zoom to improve website visibility a lot these days. Traditional zoom reflows the page, but the viewport zoom keeps the page the same, just makes it bigger. You might know this from pinching out on the touchpad on a laptop, but you can do this on a keyboard by setting `mousewheel.with_$KEY.action` to 5 to perform viewport zoom by having a keyboard key pressed. I use it with alt, and use AHK to bind XB2+scroll to emit alts instead (I make it emit ctrl regularly but alt when a firefox window is focused). It has been one of my best usability improvements recently. It's one of those things that, if you make ergonomic enough, you end up using on every single website, since you can make the column width the optimal size for your readability.

I didn't know about this, I'm on my laptop right now running macos and just tapped the trackpad with two fingers and it zoomed in. Usually I'm using a mouse and keyboard, I'll have to figure out how to do this with a keyboard shortcut.

Thanks!

I dont think you are really bothered by it either given you are discussing this on a website which has exactly the same behavior :)

Nope, HN's CSS accommodates smaller screen sizes [1]:

    /* mobile device */
    @media only screen
    and (min-width : 300px)
    and (max-width : 750px) {
      #hnmain { width: 100%; min-width: 0; }
      body { padding: 0; margin: 0; width: 100%; }
      td { height: inherit !important; }
      .title, .comment { font-size: inherit;  }
      span.pagetop { display: block; margin: 3px 5px; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal }

Not perfect by any means but at least there's an attempt.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css

Nope, your snippet proves nothing. The only font rule in it is `font-size: inherit`, which means "don't change the size." So your proof that HN resizes text is a line that resizes nothing. Since your snippet was so useless I had to go read the actual news.css to find out what rules are actually there. The result: body text goes from 12px to 13.3px.

It's still small. The widely considered standard size of body copy is 16px or 1rem.

But the thing is, which was my point all along, it doesn't fucking matter.

...it's still large enough to comfortably read without zooming in, which is not the case for Gruber's website.

Even on desktop the site is quite difficult to read. White on gray isn't a great reading experience regardless of font size.

Accessibility technology like reader mode is once again proving its worth.

White on gray is the only dark mode that doesn't hurt my eyes. I use light mode for practically everything except IntelliJ which has a great built-in "Darcula" theme (which is now opt-in in favor of a more standard dark mode that I hate) which looks similar to DF's theme.

White on black or dark gray makes my eyes bug out. I have pretty good vision but that's the only thing that actually hurts my eyes.

> White on black or dark gray makes my eyes bug out. I have pretty good vision but that's the only thing that actually hurts my eyes.

Hope you don’t get floaters when you age. You may be caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the sites I visit often I use uBlock Origin to make fonts large enough for me to read (damn you, presbyopia!). Otherwise I use Ctrl-+ to increase the font size (Daring Fireball, for example).

news.ycombinator.com##:style(font-size: 18pt !important)

myanimelist.net##:style(font-size: 14pt !important)

old.reddit.com##*:style(font-size: 17pt !important)

Just double tap the text you want to zoom to, as has been the way for nearly 20 years.

Though it’s been broken for ten.

Thank god for Reader Mode.

I remember Instapaper, that made text look good. Apple’s Read Mode settings are a bit lacking.

This website is perfectly readable.

I disagree. https://litter.catbox.moe/3h3atpy3s8ny7ify.png is a lot less readable than https://litter.catbox.moe/tqims20z6biymm3y.png

1) Double tap. 2) Reader mode.

There are two excellent solutions built into your browser!

I am literally showing the reader mode view in my screenshot. I know how to work around badly designed websites.

Right but also the first website is actually fine too and I significantly prefer mobile users not getting some weird badly thought about mobile UI.

I argue that it's not bad design. Having a separate mobile design is the root of many accessibility problems, I would rather websites do this then do things like hijack the school bar…

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