HN has chosen to use very small fonts; I also leave it a bit zoomed in. Specifically, they have: .comment { font-size: 9pt; } .commhead { font-size: 8pt; } If I turn off all the site's font-size overrides, I no longer need to zoom in.
Personally, I'm not a fan of having a web site designer thousands of miles away from me just decide what font and text size I should be using to read their web site. Why not let the browser more easily control/override this? We already have PDF if your content truly needs pixel-perfect layout. Browsers have kind of dropped the ball. They're limiting user choice and slowly turning into desktop publishing platforms rat…
It is common for serious users of time-line-based animation and compositing software as well as layer-based software such as Photoshop and Illustrator to use one display in portrait for the timelines and layers. I know I do.
I have tried using it for web-viewing, especially to find media assets such as stock footage and typefaces but usually have to move the browser to portrait because the sites usually don't display correctly on portrait.
Personally, I'm not a fan of having a web site designer thousands of miles away from me just decide what font and text size I should be using to read their web site. Why not let the browser more easily control/override this? We already have PDF if your content truly needs pixel-perfect layout. Browsers have kind of dropped the ball. They're limiting user choice and slowly turning into desktop publishing platforms rat…
Both Chrome and Safari has accessibility features to set a minimum font size in their settings page. I can't see how it could be easier.
It could be easier in Firefox where it applies per language, with no "just set everything" option (at least Latin and Other are needed for english). I highly recommend using it, although it does break sites occasionally (seems like less often these days).
I believe true webdesigners are in decline. You have lots of people who do this as a side gig after reading a few tutorials. In a way that’s a nice compliment for the accessibility of the tech, but not accessibility for the end user. Same with “We only tested this on Chrome.” of sites/apps, of which are there are many, as I can attest, as I never use Chrome.
> I believe true webdesigners are in decline. You have lots of people who do this as a side gig after reading a few tutorials. In decline from when? Picking it up after reading a few tutorials has always been a common way to get into web work, and if anything I feel like it's been getting more professionalized over the last twenty years.
Just the general gist over the last few years. I am not saying there are no really skilled professionals, I am just seeing a lot of lower par work from jobs I take over. Plus just by surfing the web and noting the quality.
Yeah, I still very often get "here is the desktop design, here is the mobile design". Depending on who is developing the designs depends how that's going to translate. I have all the time in the world for developers that reflow the page and remove/adjust elements at different breakpoints (based on the design) between 'desktop' and 'mobile' so the experience is good for everyone. Sadly, most people don't bother.
If desktop + mobile make up >95% of your audience it's hard to justify the cost of creating a third set of rules for the rest.
For my day job working on a UK e-commerce site that gets roughly 100,000 uniques a day, our split is 70/30 for mobile/desktop. Unfortunately within the company it’s closer to 1/99. So no matter how many times I repeat the phrase “mobile first”, the higher-ups just don’t get it. Luckily I can make rational decisions for them!
IMO the best solution is to just have natural breakpoints (i.e. when a part of the design of the given page would cease to work, add a breakpoint to change the format of that component, rather than at predefined points) and then for logged in users have an option to request the desktop design, which you can do by simply setting a viewport to 1000px width and leaving everything else unchanged what would be really nice…
I think we really need to be able to more cleanly separate content from the design, and let the browsers, a.k.a. user-agents, decide/override more. Browsers have ceded too much control over layout and visual structure to web designers, who go on to make (often incorrect) assumptions about how the user wants to interact with their content.
the problem is that there is no distinction between a webapp and a document, the line is thoroughly blurred. For documents, you can probably just override a fair bit of schenanigans and things will still work, if look somewhat ugly, but for a spreadsheet app that's a rube goldberg machine of javascript and continuously regenerated html and css, it'll just turn it into a broken mess. the browser has become the de facto cross compatible application platform, which requires handing a lot of control to websites.
iphoneX looks like it has a css px width of 812px. They may also be trying to capture tablets, which are pushing above 1024 css px.
I just checked and the iPhone X has a height of 812px. It has a width of 375px. The regular iPad has a width of 768px, and the iPad Pro has a width of 1024px. So you could be right about them trying to capture all tablets, though a hamburger menu on the enormous iPad Pro sounds just as ridiculous as it does on a vertical monitor
"Mobile vs desktop" is not a distinction websites should be making. Sites should make the best use they can of the available horizontal space. It's still not clear to me where you think this approach gives bad results?
Ergonomics of using touch screen vs. mouse. Usage while walking/moving vs. sitting/standing at a desk.
Most "mobile" usage is actually stationary, typically seated. If you really need to change layout based on motion you can use the accelerometer, but I can't see why you would?
People also assume phone users only hold it vertically. Most popular apps don't even allow landscape orientation. They can't even cope with varied screen sizes and orientations. I've actually found bugs when I forced them to try via split screen view.
As a product manager, my immediate response is... not worth the time. You've chosen to have a unique setup, which is fine, but your use case represents some absolutely miniscule fraction of users. On top of that, it's not even that websites are unusable, just that they're not ideal. When you decide to do weird/special/unique stuff, don't expect the world to adapt to you. You can rotate your monitor back or live with…
Seems to me that proper DPI detection might lead to a better experience across all "unique" monitor setups, not just this one.
Is it extra work? Sure. I thought we referred to that as polish.