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Comment by SEMW | Hacker News Reader

> It may be new but it is not a well-thought design. 110+ characters per line is hard to read and ugly

Er, not sure if you're looking at the before and after screenshots the wrong way round? The new design appears to reduce the number of characters per line from ~100 to ~80 (by increasing the body font size).

Compare first line of Array#slice in the old design:

"The slice() method returns a shallow copy of a portion of an array into a new array object selected"

vs the new:

"The slice() method returns a shallow copy of a portion of an array into a new array"

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I was checking the blog page which has adopted the new design. MDN pages are already responsive but the line length goes far beyond that figure in some sections. The screenshot is at reduced window size.

blog.mozilla.org isn't using the same design as the new MDN. This is how it looks on a large (3840x2160, HiDPI) screen: https://pageshot.net/0WLEGQSCHoxb4T7P/developer.mozilla.org

Feels better. But something has to be done about the overly long sidebar.

> But something has to be done about the overly long sidebar.

Can you explain why and what you would do?

Scrolling whitespace with lots of links on the side feels and looks bad. Either reinterpret it [1] or make it a separate scrollable section [2].

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation

[2] https://developer.android.com/index.html

I don't mean to be all, "ugh," but syntax should be at the top. Looking at that shot, as opposed to the one in the blog post, it will be common for syntax sections to fall off the bottom of the screen, "below the fold." This will make it less useful than sites that don't require the user to scroll to get the most basic information, such as method signatures, and MDN will continue to be a second choice.

OK, that all got a little sharp, but I do wonder what "design language" (per the blog post) is steering their information design.

I agree, but I don't think going through and reworking any actual content of the articles (these are all essentially wiki pages) is in scope for this stage of the redesign. 'atopal mentioned elsewhere in this thread [0] that they're doing this incrementally, and the next phase will be dedicated to article page layout.

You might want to mention this on the accompanying Discourse feedback thread [1] so it's noted for the next phase.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14745947

[1] https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/beta-redesign-feed...

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