Hacker News Reader

Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Eh.

I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor.

It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.

On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example.

It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that.

Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't.

edit: Obviously I know what responsive design is. I'm on Hacker News. The author hasn't done it (probably because they have better things to do), you have a trivial option to work around it.

The contrast to be drawn is with a site like Medium that deliberately goes out of its' way to be annoying and harder to use for some vague profitability goal.

View on HN

Or the website could just set a width on the text column. Why are we pretending this website is some paragon of design? Simple is good but there are still basic readability standards that are important and can be achieved with one or two lines of css.

> It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design

This concept is popular for more than 10 years now. Many websites do it with something as simple as

  article { max-width: 60em }

> It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that.

Take Twitter for web. Reduce the browser to something like 60% or 70% of the screen width. The <div><p>...</p></div> elements containing the tweets are chopped off on the right side. It disrupts my reading experience due to minor resizing. This is most of the web today.

> Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't.

That's true. I don't want to be resizing my browser up and down for every good and bad website.

It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.

   max-width:  a bunch of ems;

Okay, so on my screen that means 80% of the window is whitespace and it burns my eyes. background-color: black, I guess?

Responsive design is a thing, yes, but ultimately on a desktop computer you're always going to be able to choose a browser size that breaks a site.

> Okay, so on my screen that means 80% of the window is whitespace and it burns my eyes. background-color: black, I guess?

Apart from calibrating the room lighting and monitor brightness, one can still have a dark background for the body but not for the wrapper that has max-size on it.

E.g. http://camendesign.com/ here you would have white that burns your eyes if it was done without max-size, as is it's much better. [edit: just noticed that blog actually doesn't use max-size, it doesn't shrink; but it easily could]

> Responsive design is a thing, yes, but ultimately on a desktop computer you're always going to be able to choose a browser size that breaks a site.

Only if you make it too small.

On my laptop that site has a microscopic font size.

It's interesting though because I hit Ctrl-+ before I even realised I was doing it.

I guess I just don't see this stuff as being a big deal. It feels like a normal manual adjustment, like if I was pouring coffee and I have to make sure I aim to not spill it over the edge of the cup, or something.

Oh well. I guess we agree to disagree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com