Hacker News Reader

Comment by droidist2 | Hacker News Reader

I like the the site, although I could think of one simple thing that would make the website a bit nicer and a lot easier to read:

body { max-width:700px; margin:1em auto }

This CSS narrows the page so the text lines aren't so long, but keeps the centering.

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Protip: resize your window to your favorite reading width. Works perfectly.

Of course you could fix it manually like that, although it's nicer not to have to resize your browser for each page you visit.

It's not just a matter of aesthetics or personal preference, there are actually studies on the optimal length of lines for the human eye, generally around 10-12 words or 70-80 characters.

Modern desktop screens are too wide for efficient reading in a browser. We're long past the point where it makes sense to maximize the window. My browser viewport is approximately square in shape, and occupies about 66% of the screen area. To the left I have my tab-treeview, and to the left of that, various other windows cascaded.

You're assuming that the only possible horizontal layout of a website is a single column of text. That's not the case.

It's not the pages fault though, unless it styled it max width. According to HTML zen the browser should present it nicely by default if you just feed it some text in p elements.

As the owner of a 27" 1440p monitor, I hate sites that do this. It's infuriating to run across sites that only take up 25% (well, 27% in this suggestion) of my screen width. Even worse are the sites that manage to keep the width in pixels the same even when I zoom.

You want to read lines of text that are 27" long?

Yes.

-x-column-width: 700px;

Unless you're reading a dense novel, that shouldn't really be much of a problem. Line length is only an issue when returning to the beginning of the next line, and only very long paragraphs will be problematic in this case. Text online usually varies a lot more than a novel - lists, quotes, images, etc. - and the page in question is no exception: it's just a list of captioned images for the most part.

Hacker News, even with its tiny font, is still perfectly readable at a width of 1680 because few comments have paragraphs that are more than 2 or 3 lines long.

Well, a 27" monitor isn't actually 27" wide, but I get your point.

No, full width lines get difficult to read, but locking me into some tiny width of text on my monitor is quite annoying and, as a default behaviour, obnoxious.

Better would be a % width, perhaps with a font size that follows.

And the absolute worst is a site that uses CSS that prevents my page zoom from functioning properly.

When I watch movies or when I read lengthy materials I stand at a distance of over a meter and a half from the screen, and I zoom till I can look comfortably (with my eyes relaxed). But now there are clever people assuming way too much about their audience and so happens that the pages I come across can hold this way only around five words per line...

Also, rotating the images to be right side up, and keeping the aspect ratio would help too.

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