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Comment by mantrax4 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, why on earth is almost every word in this article body a different shade of gray?

I don't like articles where I need to bring up the browser dev tools just so I can read it.

Oh, I hate that thing.

Resizing the window takes just over two seconds to redraw, rather than being instantaneous. And when that affects the width of the text, it doesn't recolour them, so you get a bad mess. And using it on an article this long causes Firefox to have on its account explicit allocations of 214 MB, rather than the 20MB that I would consider to be slightly excessive but permissible.

Oh, I hate that thing.

It appears to be an attempt to make it easier to find the beginning of the next line after you finish reading a line. However, the effect is much too subtle to be of use, and even if made more prominent, it would still ruin the typographic color and generally confuse readers.

Better solutions include:

Using a more optimal column width. 50-60 characters per line is a commonly suggested range for most media.

Using a more optimal leading (line-height). "Set solid" type (ex. 12px/12px) is almost always a bad idea, particularly so in a long block of text. Depending on the type, media, etc, ratios in the range of 1.2-1.8 are a good starting point for improving readability.

> Using a more optimal column width.

http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux

> Using a more optimal leading (line-height).

http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#line-height

Whenever something looks odd on Gwern's site, you can check his A/B testing article[0] to see if it's intentional. In this case, it's BeeLine Reader, his newest experiment[1]. The coloring or shading is supposed to help the eye follow the line as it saccades back and forth.

[0]: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing [1]: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#beeline-reader

The text is using BeeLine Reader[1]. It tries to make reading faster by using that color gradient to guide the reader's eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. I reads a little better with the blue and red coloring, compared to just the blue.

[1] http://www.beelinereader.com/

It reads a lot better in a column width which can't be measured in positive integer miles. Unmaximize the window and you no longer need the color-cuing extension at all.

(And the people responsible for the BeeLine Reader website know this! Even maximized, their body copy is split into two columns each about fifty characters wide.)

> It reads a lot better in a column width which can't be measured in positive integer miles

I didn't find narrower versions to perform well: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux

Do you have any form of colorblindness? For me it fades in and out along the gray-blue-purple spectrum.

In my browser it renders as perfect grays, confirmed by the inspector.

Very weird. This is what I see in Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/BbocHXW.png

Ignore my 487 unread emails. I need to clean that out...

Gwern is A/B testing various versions.

I had a red/blue variant that was one of the most aggressively ugly assaults on readability I've encountered.

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