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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Completely tangential to the actual content of this blog, I really (really really really) appreciate the look. Simple dark text on light background. Obvious hyperlinks. Charts and tables that tell the story without distracting. Effective minimalism.

I wish more of the internet looked like this.

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Interesting, I really disagree. I do agree the page is refreshing compared to a lot of the internet these days, just because it has no ads and no glitchy, laggy SPA animations or slow loading times.

But it's pretty extreme to pretend that none of basic design practices adopted over the past 30 years have any merit whatsoever. This design is not good. The black text on white is too much contrast. The default browser text of Times New Roman is less readable than more modern sans serif fonts (this is arguably a problem with Chrome's default value though, not just this site). The graph titles are not text but rendered into the images, and the images have no alt text to help with accessibility. The double solid border on cell boundaries in the tables looks crazy and does distract from the content. The page content is much narrower than it should be on desktop, it could use an adaptive width. There is no dark mode to make the page easier on your eyes in low light.

The design here on HN is a much better example to strive for, it has a similar minimalist aesthetic but addresses most of these issues.

I wish more of the internet behaved like this, but I do not need it to look like this.

The dark mode is built into your browser if you set the browser embedded style to dark.

It integrates flawlessly for me.

Huh, it doesn't work for me with MacOS system settings set to Dark Mode, even though that does usually work in the browser for sites like google that support dark mode.

I think browsers started dropping the ability to use system colors a few years ago. Presumably because some web sites make assumptions about colors and become unusable (like white text on white background). But not this site!

Agree I'd hate for the internet to look like a corporate Google Doc. An interactive New York Times article is very pleasing to read (minus all the ads)

> The black text on white is too much contrast.

This statement intrigued me. Without getting into what is fashion and progress (because I am NOT a designer), I was curious what is "too much" contrast. There's lots of literature out there about applying too much contrast in image/photo elements. But here, we're talking about text, and this honestly piqued my interest. Too little is usually pretty obvious. But what is too much? I don't honestly know.

I found the discussion at https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/123504/maximum-contra... pretty interesting.

There is a minimum contrast specified for a reason, because more contrast is better to read.

Modern designers argue that high contrast is "harder on the eyes" and they seem to prefer solid colored boxes. It is a real pitty, infested the web with sites that are basically gray on gray. Great, the text is now out of the way for the beautiful design and the eyes can relax from all the reading. Except when you actually want to read it.

No really, low contrast text is a real strain and these "too much contrast" arguments are too blame that it still happens.

Higher contrast means a lower overall screen brightness is still comfortably readable. I think many people just don't think to turn down the display brightness and think that the content on the display is causing the issue.

I prefer it too, and is like the very early internet, which was only missing CSS to set the main text in column with a maximum width.

Yes good point. It takes me back to when content really mattered.

I make a concerted effort for every personal project I have to be laid out like this, fast loading, searchable, nothing in the way.

And that's why I do it that way. No other reason. Definitely not because I can't do modern design to save my life...

But that tiny column width is horrible and totally unfriendly to those of us with oldster eyes who magnify every web page with their tiny fonts.

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