Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One Way to Improve Your Coding

changelog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 121 posts

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#11

Post by Swizec »

FreezerburnV wrote: post #3

I'm going to be "that guy" in the comments section this time, largely because I feel like I've been seeing this more recently and I've had to fix it myself: I don't really get why it seems to be a "thing" recently for websites to have low-contrast text colors. This is at least the second time in a week I've seen light gray text on white background, and to not strain my eyes I went into the CSS for the website and fix…

From my limited exposure to designers, I've learned that they think lower contrast strains reader's eyes less than high contrast does. Black on white is thought to be too striking to read comfortably.

Here is a post from 2012 explaining why it's important to use a dark grey instead of a pure black: https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black

And I agree. Pure black often looks bad.

Light gray is even worse.

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#12

Post by another-dave »

Raphmedia wrote: post #5
FreezerburnV wrote: post #3

I'm going to be "that guy" in the comments section this time, largely because I feel like I've been seeing this more recently and I've had to fix it myself: I don't really get why it seems to be a "thing" recently for websites to have low-contrast text colors. This is at least the second time in a week I've seen light gray text on white background, and to not strain my eyes I went into the CSS for the website and fix…

Their text to background colour ratio is 4.6 which is really not that bad with their 18px font-size. That being said, I'm not a fan of grey on white either.

Yeah, it's actually WCAG double-A compliant.

Agree in general though, more & more I end up tweaking site's font-size/line-height/contrast to bring it back to normality.

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#13

Post by pc86 »

Swizec wrote: post #11
FreezerburnV wrote: post #3

I'm going to be "that guy" in the comments section this time, largely because I feel like I've been seeing this more recently and I've had to fix it myself: I don't really get why it seems to be a "thing" recently for websites to have low-contrast text colors. This is at least the second time in a week I've seen light gray text on white background, and to not strain my eyes I went into the CSS for the website and fix…

From my limited exposure to designers, I've learned that they think lower contrast strains reader's eyes less than high contrast does. Black on white is thought to be too striking to read comfortably. Here is a post from 2012 explaining why it's important to use a dark grey instead of a pure black: https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black And I agree. Pure black often looks bad. Light gray is even worse.

> Black on white is thought to be too striking to read comfortably.

It is, but (very) dark gray text on a (very) dark gray background is fine. This light gray on white thing is just nonsense.

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#14

Post by coder5506 »

Can anyone recommend good tools for reading code? I find github.com to be very klunky for this purpose, and even emacs/vim make the task much more troublesome than it could be. Is there such a thing as a "read-only IDE" anywhere out there? (Ideally features would include click-to-definition, navigate back and forth, add bookmarks and annotations.)

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#15

Post by japhyr »

coder5506 wrote: post #14

Can anyone recommend good tools for reading code? I find github.com to be very klunky for this purpose, and even emacs/vim make the task much more troublesome than it could be. Is there such a thing as a "read-only IDE" anywhere out there? (Ideally features would include click-to-definition, navigate back and forth, add bookmarks and annotations.)

This is a great idea, if it doesn't already exist.

Edit: On a little further reflection, it would be really fun to build. I can imagine a site called something like readgithub.org, which is a dedicated site for reading the code hosted in github repositories. You could start focusing on projects in one language only.

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#16

Post by RBerenguel »

coder5506 wrote: post #14

Can anyone recommend good tools for reading code? I find github.com to be very klunky for this purpose, and even emacs/vim make the task much more troublesome than it could be. Is there such a thing as a "read-only IDE" anywhere out there? (Ideally features would include click-to-definition, navigate back and forth, add bookmarks and annotations.)

You can have all these in emacs and (probably) vim, as long as you configure them properly for the specific language bindings (for jump to definition). For bookmarks, there's functionality in both, same for annotations (IIRC you can use org-mode to create annotations, for vim not sure what but definitely there is something)

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#17

Post by FreezerburnV »

Swizec wrote: post #11
FreezerburnV wrote: post #3

I'm going to be "that guy" in the comments section this time, largely because I feel like I've been seeing this more recently and I've had to fix it myself: I don't really get why it seems to be a "thing" recently for websites to have low-contrast text colors. This is at least the second time in a week I've seen light gray text on white background, and to not strain my eyes I went into the CSS for the website and fix…

From my limited exposure to designers, I've learned that they think lower contrast strains reader's eyes less than high contrast does. Black on white is thought to be too striking to read comfortably. Here is a post from 2012 explaining why it's important to use a dark grey instead of a pure black: https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black And I agree. Pure black often looks bad. Light gray is even worse.

Fair enough! But if webpages that did "black on white"-style text, like a book, and just emulated what books look like, (not-really black text and not-really white background) I'd be 100% ok with that. Modifying a webpage to not have light gray text is much easier to type "0" for the color than to type out an exact, least-eye-strain gray. I'd much prefer if designers put in the least-eye-strain gray for me :)

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#18

Post by japhyr »

weeksie wrote: post #4

So this is a good place to list really nice codebases. sqlite is a fantastic piece of source code, totally worth reading.

For Python, I really like reading Kenneth Reitz' code. For example the Requests library is pretty good reading [0]. When reading code, I like to have the documentation handy as well [1].

The Django project is also good reading. [2], [3]

[0] - Requests code: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests

[1] - Requests documentation: http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/

[2] - Django code: https://github.com/django/django

[3] - Django documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#19

Post by sharkjacobs »

Swizec wrote: post #11
FreezerburnV wrote: post #3

I'm going to be "that guy" in the comments section this time, largely because I feel like I've been seeing this more recently and I've had to fix it myself: I don't really get why it seems to be a "thing" recently for websites to have low-contrast text colors. This is at least the second time in a week I've seen light gray text on white background, and to not strain my eyes I went into the CSS for the website and fix…

From my limited exposure to designers, I've learned that they think lower contrast strains reader's eyes less than high contrast does. Black on white is thought to be too striking to read comfortably. Here is a post from 2012 explaining why it's important to use a dark grey instead of a pure black: https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black And I agree. Pure black often looks bad. Light gray is even worse.

I wonder if this rule of thumb will change when OLEDs are most common displays.

It seems like it might be worth taking advantage of OLEDs ability to do unlit black.

Re: One Way to Improve Your Coding

#20

Post by wmeredith »

FreezerburnV wrote: post #3

I'm going to be "that guy" in the comments section this time, largely because I feel like I've been seeing this more recently and I've had to fix it myself: I don't really get why it seems to be a "thing" recently for websites to have low-contrast text colors. This is at least the second time in a week I've seen light gray text on white background, and to not strain my eyes I went into the CSS for the website and fix…

I've been a UX designer for 10 years and I can tell you why. (Or at least why from point of view.)

It's a deprecated design practice to make font rendering looks smoother in a world where retina screens were not ubiquitous. Back in the old days (so like 3 years ago) before the majority of screens were 'retina' (aka you can't see the pixels at normal viewing distances) fonts always rendered with jagged edges. Turning down the contrast between a font and its background is effective in reducing this effect. It reduces the contrast, it's a very straightforward mechanic. Obviously, this is moot now with razor font rendering on retina screens. And if you do it too much, you risk accessibility problems.

The nonsense about black on a white background being too harsh because of eye strain is exactly that: nonsense. If you wanted to reduce eye strain, you'd dial down the brightness of the actual background, often seen in "nightmode" options offered in various UI. (Come to think of it, that would be hilarious if you hit "nightmode" and it just lightened the text, making the overall screen even brighter.)

Post reply on HN