Hacker News Reader

Comment by Augenstern | Hacker News Reader

I like the man page format each post has on this website. A little hard to read, but very unique.

Yeah, 2023 and reflowing documents still isn't a thing. Yay

I read this on mobile and it felt pretty tedious. I wonder if maybe some minimal HTML could make the paragraphs reflow properly while still looking like a manpage everywhere.

What sort of keyhole are you peering through that needs to reflow 72-character text lines?

A phone? Your comment is 3 lines for me.

Just checked; both my comment and TFA appear full width on my phone. Bog-standard Android.

Maybe other people do not use the same setup as you do.

That much is obvious given that a vanilla phone setup has no trouble with even 90-character lines. Not my business to stop anyone making things hard on themselves, though, so good luck you all!

(do we have anyone who reads HN over a morse clacker?)

I have vision problems, I increase zoom a lot in desktop and mobile.

What do you have against people different than youself?

Nothing; I wished you luck! I imagine people with screenreaders have an even tougher time...

(mobile I agree would be hopeless with zoom [I avoid reading on mine even without zoom], but does your desktop zoom mean even TFA's vt100-friendly 72-chars needed reflowing?)

I don't always increase zoom but TFA is def too small on desktop. I just increase until its readable, that being said, the article is comfortable for me at about 200-250%. Reflow issues seem to occur at 300% - so no issue for me but I could see some people going that high.

Which is ironic, given that man pages do reflow on different-width terminals and have done since the '90s.

This is supposed to be functional, not art work. Make it legible; easy to digest.

I guess it's fitting for a tool (make) that is also unergonomic by today's standards.

I wouldn't use this format myself either, but that's the fun with personal websites: you can do whatever you want. There's no law that says stuff needs to be functional. People who dislike it will just move on.

Typography isn’t set. It _is_ about legibility and therefore proper typography _is_ functional.

This site simply isn’t as legible as it could be. I am not suggesting it needs to be “pretty”. A monospaced Markdown file would be more legible.

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