Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

Text can be beautiful, but only if you don't go out of your way to make it less so.

This is a view of my entire screen when this page loads. https://imgur.com/Lh3Ibo3

That's decidedly not beautiful.

And while WCAG checkers all swear that both this site and the linked tilde.town pass text contrast guidelines with flying (* ahem *) colors, my eyes just cannot cope with trying to read the text on those backgrounds.

View on HN

Thanks for the feedback. In trying to make the text look good in medium to small screens, I hadn't considered what the page could look like for people reading on a screen that is more than 1440 pixels across. I've modified the css file. Clear your browsing history and try looking at the article again.

Are you the author? Thanks for nice article, I always love to confirm my own opinions! I agree with ebg13, the presentation of your article could be a little more attractive. On a web made for reading there are few simple style rules I use for all text. 1st, I use a line-height of at least 1.5 because every browser's default line spacing is too narrow. (Quanta Magazine gets posted here a lot and I think their average line height is 1.875.) 2nd, keep column width to 100 characters or below (the article already meets this). And 3rd, keep background colors desaturated as to not distract from the most important part of the website: the text!

Yes, I'm the author. I try hard to accommodate as many browsers/apps/screen sizes/devices/reader preferences as possible. But given the large number of them, it is not possible to make every reader 100% happy. I've found that keeping things simple generally works well for most people. For those who want to leave comments about the problems associated with their particular approach to reading my website, I have given them a place to do so: https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/cheapskatesguide-and-b....

If you want to see an example of what (I and some others) think is a nice typographic layout for the web have a look at https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

It is what I used for my personal blog and I've liked it a great deal.

I don't like it either, but at least I can disable CSS. But I think for most documents, it is probably better to just write it without CSS. And then, it will already be optimized for whatever display they are using presumably; you don't have to make it one way for one user, one way for other, etc, which will never be suitable for everyone, anyways.

I agree that your screenshot is not very readable, but on the contrary, I think that if you make your browser window that large, you are naturally going to get text that's sized similarly.

Personally, I find the site readable --- and far better than a lot of others.

on a related note, walls of text are not particularly attractive. i'd suggest using a rule-of-3: sub-divide any sections longer than 3 paragraphs using sub-headers.

it also helps to sharpen the main throughline, and leave tangents in asides, tables/diagrams, footnotes, links, and similar (possibly even a popup in the right circumstance, like a definitional aside).

same, uMatrix > disable CSS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com