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Comment by dontdieych | Hacker News Reader

If you decide to publish long serious article to web, please consider use css for better readability. Don't rely on browser default css too much. They are very busy to make javascript fast. Especially, please don't use 100% width. Sure, our displays have far more width than height. But that width is good for movie, not text. Put any books on your monitor. Then reduce text line width.

https://www.readability.com/articles/zrgovuxr

TW;DR: Too Wide, Didn't Read.

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This article is 15 years old. There wasn't much in the way of CSS back then, much less responsive design. But the brilliant thing is it still works perfectly, because it's so simple! Pop your tab to a window and resize, or use a readability browser extension/website. Oh, you just did that.

haha yeah

I can pretty much always read sites that don't bother to override the browser defaults, whereas people's CSS efforts often make things hard to read.

It's obviously possible to make sites nicer using CSS, but if you're just trying to let people read your words rather than show off your design skills, leaving it to the browser's defaults is absolutely fine.

If more sites did this maybe we'd get something a little nicer. Til then, you can always set your own defaults.

There is a bookmarklet for this: javascript:(function(){ document.body.style.width='600px'; })()

Mostly I'm fine with default css but only 100% width. This could be helpful in many old article like this. Thanks

Just quietly this article has been around since 2003.. Its still an extremely useful resource, and FYI, chrome on android renders this page just fine. To further on that sentiment, coming from someone posting on hacker news I find your comment amusingly ironic.

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