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Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#161

Post by HPsquared »

pc86 wrote: post #153
sillysaurusx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't address the author's central argument, which is that websites need an effortless way of letting fonts become bigger without affecting the entire layout. I've wanted it too. I don't really care if some text gets cut off on headers and looks weird, I just want to read stuff from the comfort of my bed with my laptop a few feet away.

> I just want to read stuff from the comfort of my bed with my laptop a few feet away. That's not what laptops are for. I think that's a typical snide HN/Stack Overflow-type answer, and I don't mean it rudely, but it does have some bearing on this conversation. What's the intended form factor of a laptop? What are the top 10 intended form factors? I'm not sure "reading from 'a few' [several] feet away, while I'm layi…

Until 2020, it was probably uncommon. Not so sure now.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#162

Post by teddyh »

oblio wrote: post #148
jfk13 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic Are you entirely sure about that?

Ok, now do bold ;-)

You mean 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀?

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#163

Post by teddyh »

oblio wrote: post #150
thepratt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you weren't aware https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc may be helpful. There are some basic options for text formatting on HN, including italics and bold.

There is no bold.

𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲?

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#164

Post by freebreakfast »

jefftk wrote: post #48

Sites are not detecting a portrait screen and deciding that they're displaying on a phone. Someone who switches their monitor to portrait, or resizes a window to be taller than it is wide, is still going to get the desktop view. In this case the author is scaling their resolution, and so their browser is presenting itself to sites as 720px wide. Sites see that and show a layout optimized for a screen of that width. T…

> The author's proposed solution is for sites to use DPI instead

This is untenable as well. You'll end up with microscopic websites on high DPI phone screens.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#165

Post by aasasd »

Browsers should provide to websites the user's (typical) distance to the eye, and preferred zoom level. Maybe also the preferred type of input, to tell mouse users from finger users.

Obviously pixel count and screen ratio is complete nonsense, in this almost-glorious day of sweet variety of gadgetry. It will only become more of a nonsense, until we all switch to neural interfaces.

But since designers only have what CSS&JS provide, they cling to the pixel count and DPI, choose a font size according to someone's eyesight, and stick to that. This is bogus, and leads to fonts from something like two mm in height (ahem HN cough) to almost a centimeter, so I either have to stick my nose to the phone screen, or hold the phone at a full arm length and scroll like mad. And browser zoom is no help in this model.

Meanwhile, in the real world, all that matters is the visual angle of the font or image, and the user's eyesight. The first is dictated by the distance from the screen, and the second determines how much the content must be zoomed in from the perfect-vision scenario. In fact, since I wouldn't want the content to grow and shrink when I move my arm somewhat or lay back in the chair, perhaps devices could use some default visual-angle values according to their form-factor and typical usage, then adjust for the user's chosen zoom level, and report only one value to websites: either preferred visual angle, or zoom level from some global anchor value—whichever of the two is better to use for calculations.

With this info, the screen's pixel resolution affects only one consideration: whether a given line of text or other content would fit in the screen horizontally at the preferred visual ratio—or it must be broken or scrolled.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#166

Post by _trampeltier »

ChrisRR wrote: post #83

As with every engineering project, there's always a point where you have to look at how few people are within a certain use case and decide it's not worth the effort to cater for them As a vertical PC user, you're in the vast minority, and you can't really be surprised that people don't want to spend the extra time (and money) developing to support your edge case

On work, I know a couple of people who use vertical screens (including me). At home I have a large 43" 4K monitor (no scaling). A lot of websites think it would be something like a 23" 4K monitor and everything on the website is super large. As rule of thumb, as more fancz the website is, the more is the website broken if you don't use just a 08/15 monitor.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#168

Post by ThePadawan »

iamben wrote: post #90
ThePadawan wrote: post #6

Just because my horizontal resolution is around 1200, I am not on a tablet. It's amazing how many websites are incredibly unusable when displayed 2-up on my 27" monitor. There's so much screen estate, but I often literally have to resize the window to fullscreen to find a search or login field.

It's a difficult one though - say I have left menu, and a sidebar on the right, and a central column with my copy. Very roughly, at about ~1350px (so neatly displayed on a generic 1440 laptop) I have about 250*2 (500px) for my sidebars, about 800px for my central column, which at a decent font size will give me a 'right-ish' about of words per line, and a few more pixels for gutters. As you start to make that smaller…

I see your point, and I'm not complaining about that.

As you point out:

> Maybe the search bar becomes an icon (...)

I'd already be ecstatic about that.

I'm talking about features which are essential to a website that just disappear completely because the owner thinks "no one on a tablet will ever want to use this".

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