Hacker News Reader

Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

This may be out of place, and I have no doubt that Douglas Crockford is a genius and an all-around excellent human being. Also, I am pretty firmly in the substance over style camp of web design.

Having said that, I find it pretty hard to accept webpages (in 2009!) that have this for design:

    <body bgcolor=linen> 
    <h1 align=center><font size="+4">JavaScript:</font><br>

Thank god for Readability...

Updates: Yes, by Readability I mean http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ It's an outstanding little mini-app. If you don't know it, try it.

Second, I want to clarify that what I quoted is literall the entire style for the whole page. I find that mind-boggling. (And, yes, I thought of PG's site.)

Finally, the page was written in 2001, so my crack about 2009 isn't quite fair. Still, many people do update their sites.

View on HN

Ha! I hit the Readability bookmarklet right after clicking on the link on HN and seeing Crockford's site. And I come back to find your comment.

Another example of a genius having a similar site is Peter Norvig - http://norvig.com/

Great content on both sites, and yes, thank god for Readability

This is a fair point, but people do update their websites. Some people, some of the time. Still, I'll update my post to note that.

You should also take a look at sources of paulgraham.com, norvig.com and tlb.org. They all use horrible markup and tables for layout.

The fact that they don't care what their html code looks like should tell us something.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "it should tell us something." So, I apologize in advance if the following is a misunderstanding. (For the record, I don't much care about someone's HTML per se. I'm talking about presentation. I'm not being a web standards fanatic, if that's what you meant.)

If you mean that they are all substance and no frills and that that's a good thing (or something along those lines), I would argue that presentation matters. You don't have to follow the latest fashions, but Crockford's site makes it literally hard to read his (excellent) articles. There are no margins. The line spacing is painful. Applying Readability to that page makes the article not just prettier but more substantive (because I can draw the meaning from it more easily).

Giving literally zero thought to the visuals of a webpage is comparable to giving literally zero thought to the order of a presentation or paper. All writing is partly about communicating, and giving no thought to such things is not cool and intellectual. It's likely to be lazy or pretentious.

(One of Giles Bowkett's posts about this page makes an interesting comparison of the visual layout of Hacker News versus that of the Guardian. Found the post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news.... The bit that struck me is this:

> If you are a geek, you are probably consuming information in a less sophisticated structure then your non-geek peers.

I think there's some truth to that, especially in this case.)

The line spacing is the default one presented by your browser; if you find fault with the line-spacing, you're finding fault with your browser preferences.

And margins are generally no good. Depending on how they're effected, what margins do is perhaps make the page more attractive for those running their browser at fullscreen, while screwing over everyone doing the appropriate thing, which is to keep the window opened at the user's desired size for reading. This is because they are either implemented as a) a centered, fixed-width column that invokes horizontal scroll bars for those whose preferred size is smaller than required by the layout (usually no less than 850 pixels these days), or b) fixed margins so that, e.g., a 640 pixel wide viewport on a page with 200+ pixel margins reduces the effective column width to less than 250 pixels.

As for pretension, I agree, although it doesn't originate from the likes of Crockford, but instead those uncompromising fucks who find their "artistic vision" for a website to be of greater importance than their employers' content.

This site is perfectly readable. Would you care to let us know since when sites like these are out of fashion on a discussion board with the epithet "Hacker" in its name?

Obviously this is a matter of taste (and I'm starting to pile up down votes, so I may very well be in the minority).

I can't give you a date, but consider for example the ongoing discussion in the Perl community about the look of PerlMonks, the new Perl blogs site and the updates to the online Perldoc site and the main Perl site.

Again, I want to stress that I'm not talking about decorative fonts or elaborate colorschemes. A webpage with no margins and very tight line-spacing is not in my mind anywhere near perfectly readable.

As far as the hackers thing goes, I've rarely seen a hacker without a preference for a carefully-crafted PS1 (colors and all) or a good Vim/Emacs/TextMate theme. So it's not the case that hackers don't care at all about appearance in all circumstances.

Edit: Here's a good comparison site: http://diveintomark.org/ The layout is dead simple, but the margins, font choice and line spacing make a huge difference.

It's not a page devoid of margins. Pages that actually have no margins are difficult to read.

Although, maybe if you prefer narrow column widths, you should resize your browser window. And while you're at it, help convince those web developers that required 1024+ pixel widths on pages are counterproductive.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Is that the script you're referring to?

Yes. If you haven't tried it, run and do it now. It's one of those "I can't believe nobody thought of this before" moments.

I noticed recently that it doesn't seem to combat the worst offenders: sites using width= attributes or invisible-table-based margins. I hit Readability, and the content is still squished to one side. Heck, I turn styles off and it's still squished to one side. This is what people mean when they say these old sites aren't "accessible": they can't be transformed into pure content to be input into something else (Readability, or a screen-reader, it makes little difference.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com