Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

This is not a well designed website. The names of the colors aren't even searchable (because it's not actual text), and unless Japanese people read roman letters differently than we do, letters rotated 90 degrees is awful for readability and should never be used. Text color is also never adapted to background color, pick "Sakura" for example and the white foreground text is completely unreadable.

View on HN

When Japanese text is written vertically, Roman letters (with the exception of short acronyms) are indeed written with a 90-degree clockwise rotation. If you were reading a novel in Japanese that contains a brief English quotation, you would turn the book 90-degrees counterclockwise and then read it normally as you would in English. Non-fiction or technical works where English quotations, code examples, or mathematical formulas would be common are not usually written vertically.

As true as that may be, it's silly to be doing that with a lot of text on a website, which is primarily viewed on a computer monitor (or phone, but most people have auto-rotation on their phones enabled all the time anyway). When every colour name has the English underneath it, it seems like this would be a prime use case for left-to-right, not top-to-bottom.

Japanese readers don’t literally rotate the book unless it’s a long quotation. For names or a quote of several words you just get used to reading rotated text.

I’m not arguing this is a good design. The parent post said “... and unless Japanese people read roman letters differently than we do...”, so I was pointing out that, in this context, they do.

Tategaki (vertical script) is a traditional style and, anecdotally, younger Japanese people find it harder to read than yokogaki (horizontal script). Using tategaki on websites at all is unusual.

> Tategaki (vertical script) is a traditional style and, anecdotally, younger Japanese people find it harder to read than yokogaki (horizontal script)

Hello from Japan. Searching in Japanese gives no result and I fail to comprehend how is this even possible, given that almost everything is written in tategaki. Where did you get this info?

I think I remembered reading it here: https://www.learnwitholiver.com/japanese/blog-post-2

My mistake. Thanks for the correction.

The aesthetics would be ruined by left to right writing. You don't make a website about "traditional" colors and purposely use a Mincho font and not also use the traditional orientation. The color name underneath isn't "English" either, it's Japanese written with Latin characters. The convention is to rotate left to right scripts when using vertical typesetting, complaining about it is like complaining about an American site spelling "colour" as color.

>You don't make a website about "traditional" colors and purposely use a Mincho font and not also use the traditional orientation.

Actually, you do. It would be an easier experience for the target audience (which I assume isn't primarily Japanese speakers, otherwise they wouldn't be using romaji for the names). I have nothing against aesthetic purity, but it gets in the way of content here. They are not inextricable.

>The convention is to rotate left to right scripts when using vertical typesetting, complaining about it is like complaining about an American site spelling "colour" as color.

The convention is fine; adherence to the convention in a medium to which the convention is clearly not suited is what I'm taking issue with. It may be fine for printed media - that doesn't make it fine, in this quantity, for the web. A better comparison would be a website for, say, an Arabic colour palette and the romanization is written backwards.

I have no trouble learning Japanese by reading books and manga with tategaki - but to say that it is the style best suited for anything trying to be "aesthetically Japanese", no matter the content or medium, is what I disagree with.

> which I assume isn't primarily Japanese speakers, otherwise they wouldn't be using romaji for the names

Romaji gets used for stylistic purposes for plenty of things that aren't meant for non-Japanese. Surely as a manga reader you would notice this?

I don't see what about a computer screen makes rotating text impossible. People don't literally rotate the thing they're reading when it's done in print either. Text rotated 90° gets used posters (which you can't rotate) too. I've even seen it done in America.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~sq6s-osm/tategaki.html has numbers as an exception, too.

> Japanese people read roman letters differently than we do, letters rotated 90 degrees is awful for readability and should never be used

Unless Japanese people read words differently than we do, letters rotated to face the same direction as the words they compose is exactly the right way to do things; consistent but rotated word shapes are more recognizable than words composed of letters that are oriented at right angles to the way the word runs.

not a bad design, it's designed by/for Japanese people and Japanese sensibilities

It's still an unresolved "problem" in "fluorescent" (or painted) business signs in the US --Crate & Barrel, for example. You will see this is most business (Main) Streets.

Some rotate 90, maybe most don't, but there are those that do. Also, some "go (read) up" some "go down".

> The names of the colors aren't even searchable (because it's not actual text),

This might have something to do with the fact that the site predates CSS transforms.

What about using a fully saturated primary color as the background on a page about subtly different shades of colors?

This is a feature, not a bug imo. Clicking a color changes the background, giving you a comparative sense of the pallette and it's complements.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com