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Comment by progval | Hacker News Reader

> And did you let the browser choose the font? Don’t make me read such text with Times New Roman.

I don't understand this attitude. If you don't like Times New Roman, why don't you change your browser's default font?

What I don't like is when websites tell my browser to use a different font or different colors than the ones I configured.

(Off-topic, but something that really annoys me is websites that make text in <textarea> very dark grey without changing the background; as I configured a black background and white text)

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> What I don't like is when websites tell my browser to use a different font or different colors than the ones I configured.

The web must be a very disappointing place for you.

I block Google Font, so most of the time I end up with the default font anyway

> The web must be a very disappointing place for you.

Yes, yes it is.

And it ain't just the fonts…

Why is that? Do you also find it infuriating when magazines and books don't use your preferred font? Perhaps it annoys you when web pages don't use your favourite colour for every element too.

Web pages are designed and typography is part of the design.

I use an ebook reader and it lets me configure the font, size, spacing, and margins.

I don't mind printed books and magazines because it's a constraint of the medium; but for websites it's a missed opportunity.

Books are often typeset by competent people (or at least people who are enough to have opinions on typesetting) while the web is usually the result of middle management and marketing seeing you as the dumb thing keeping some metric too low.

Magazines are their own thing although typically this does apply to the actual articles themselves; Someone who knows what they're doing lays them out.

You have my full agreement. Disallowing website-chosen fonts (or enforcing minimum font size) can break some things slightly, but is worth it in my eyes. But with colors, there are way too many sites blindly assuming a black-on-white browser stylesheet not just for textarea, but for the entire website, making everything unreadable. And you can't win there: Turning of color overriding entirely makes for a calmer, more unified experience, but utterly breaks the usability of a number of interfaces (not the fault of the website).

Serifs can be a good thing for readability! I don’t know that the creator’s choice to force sans-serif was ideal here.

When I was taught design in the early oughts they said serif for print and sans for screens. I think it had to do with rendering at lower resolutions and small screen sizes.

Indeed, if you've ever had the chance to compare serifs on a 96dpi and a 170dpi monitor, or even 300dpi, it's absolutely incredible. At those resolutions serifs are absolutely awesome - but I'll never use them at lower resolutions again.

I think ideally, your browser should have a default serif, sans-serif, and monospace font, and websites should default to using it. I think there are useful cases for each style, but we really need not download seven fonts every time we load a website.

Sometimes it’s necessary, as the number of code points and thus scripts supported by default fonts is low.

Firefox allows you to lock fonts based on serif, sans-serif, and monospace. I have done such, along with also setting a minimum font size. And honestly the only thing it ever seems to break are those stupid icon fonts.

Most websites are not designed for you, the 0.5% of users who are running some personalized style sheet override. They’re designed for the other 99.5% of people who don’t even realize that’s possible.

It's not a stylesheet, it's good old font choice dialog.

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