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Design of This Website (2021)

gwern.net

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Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#201

Post by gwern »

pSYoniK wrote: post #132

It feels quite busy after claiming minimalism. Also, not a huge fan to see Disquss being used and a bunch of JS just to serve static content. Seems like most of the things us humans do - a cacophony of contradictions. Like the simple color scheme though, so points for that.

Yeah, I dislike the Disqus comments a lot. At least they let you disable the ads these days (it's hidden in the site config). But I don't want to deal with spam or write my own commenting system, and there's network effects. The Disqus is a concession towards practicality.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#202

Post by gwern »

bmitc wrote: post #29

I wouldn't necessarily call this a minimalist design. I do like Tufte-style websites with sidenotes, but these don't show on mobile for this site, despite my tablet having a large screen. > Gwern.net used Baskerville, but system Baskerville fonts don’t have small caps. Can someone explain to me what is meant by this? I don't understand what not having small caps means. I use Baskerville in my LaTeX documents with Mic…

"These may have varying features, for example some lacking small caps." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville#Digital_versions We use smallcaps heavily as an alternative to bolding everything, but it would be bad if we just use "font-family: Baskerville" and all sorts of unpredictable low-quality fonts out there screw it up. That Baskerville font you paid for probably has them... but how is a reader's web browser going to use it?

> I do like Tufte-style websites with sidenotes, but these don't show on mobile for this site, despite my tablet having a large screen.

Your iPad Safari reports having a width of ~1180 pixels in landscape mode, even though you have 2x the physical pixels (ie. 2x DPI scaling). This is much too small for sidenotes. Not getting sidenotes is correct. I don't think gwern.net is anything odd in this regard, every other responsive design website you visit must be giving you the same condensed view. Unless you're doing something like disabling scaling? Then in that case I guess maybe it should work and I'd need a screenshot & more information to see what's going wrong. (Maybe a media-query or something.)

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#203

Post by gwern »

eigenvalue wrote: post #26

Gwern’s site always reminds me of the Talmud (Jewish religious text), which also has a highly distinctive design with multiple “panels” and heavy emphasis of commentary and references. It’s also somewhat confusing and intimidating the the “uninitiated” reader! It is certainly memorable though.

Speaking of the Talmud... https://www.gwern.net/Red#peterson-et-al-2019

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#204

Post by gwern »

Jaruzel wrote: post #35

Yet again, this is a website that has clearly only been tested on a hiDPI screen. At 100% scaling on Windows, the serif font used doesn't kern or render properly; crossbars in letters such as 't' and 'f' are overweight compared to other strokes, and makes the font look uneven. Designers all seem to think we use 4k screens at 200% scaling, for that ultra smooth look, when in reality, that's far from the case[1]. Edit:…

I use Firefox on X11 with an ordinary non-HiDPI Dell monitor, and Said doesn't use a HiDPI monitor. (As far as being designers, I am not but Said is.)

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#205

Post by gwern »

wanda wrote: post #77

It's clear that a lot of love and attention to detail has gone into the making of this website. I like the typography, I like the layout on desktop, I feel like that's very much complete, apart from one thing I'll mention later. As another person has commented, it does feel inspired by Tufte stuff — though I actually find the Tufte CSS implementation to be preferable to look at aesthetically and preferable for actual…

Putting the eye-disable button into the theme toggle isn't a bad idea. I used the most common icon I could find for the idea of 'disabling' and made it prominent in each popup, but people still don't seem to realize it's there. Maybe it needs even more prominent billing.

The indent vs newline thing is something that Said & I have long argued about. I like it somewhat more than newlines, but I feel that newlines is just too much of a convention online at this point, and even if indenting is correct, it alienates readers. (We haven't debated newline-on-mobile / indent-on-desktop before - he's not a fan of that either, turns out - although IMO the case for newline on mobile is stronger than on desktop.) We may have to do an A/B test at some point to see if there's a measurable effect.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#206

Post by gwern »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #167
cousin_it wrote: post #78

I like the minimalism of Gwern's site, but the text formatting doesn't feel especially readable. Dan Luu's site has a similar problem https://danluu.com/nothing-works/ by the time I get to the end of a line, it's hard to find the beginning of the next one. Also maybe a matter of taste, but it feels to me like serif fonts are good for books but not so great on the web. The most readable text formatting I've seen on th…

An easy way to increase readability would be to use multiple columns. That's how newspapers do it. The web is of course a little different but long lines are a problem. Note on mobile the width is typically only as wide as the screen, which is good. But mobile is really not good for reading in general.

Multiple columns for wide windows is something I find interesting. I haven't seen anyone do a two-column layout which I find satisfactory. https://breckyunits.com/ is a fascinating example, but the layout goes vertically, so the result is bizarre: the most recent article will be cheek by jowl with an old page from 2012. I think it would need be the opposite, wrap horizontally, and scroll-in-place. Something like that. If I ever make another site, I might try to do something along those lines (and maybe use a red/blue centric color scheme).

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#207

Post by gwern »

leephillips wrote: post #123

The content is and has always been interesting, so one can forgive the design, which I feel is poor and irrational in some ways. Poor because the line width is too long and the proportions are unattractive. Complex information that loads on hover can work offline, as in the sioyek PDF reader, when it’s fast, but is a terrible experience over the network. All that apparatus littering the text is distracting, but the i…

> Irrational because of such things as the fixed elements for site settings that only appear on the first page and fade out as you scroll down. If they're only intended to appear at the top, why give them fixed positioning?

They have fixed positioning because they are not only intended to appear at the top. They can be invoked at any time by hovering over the faded-out sticky.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#208

Post by gwern »

deepsun wrote: post #126

Dynamic screen resizing has a few bugs. E.g. I dragged right screen border around and at one point (almost minimal width) saw that logo becomes gigantic and takes pretty much all the screen space. Element:

Said will look into that.

Re: Design of This Website (2021)

#209

Post by gwern »

airstrike wrote: post #3

I absolutely love the footnotes along the sidebars (though I would prefer it if they were all on the same side)

I've suggested that. My idea was that you could put the sidenotes on one side, and the margin notes on the other.

A downside of this, however, is that sidenotes are only useful if they are close to their referent and you can easily 'look to the side' to read them and then back. If you can't, they're just footnotes. And if you take away half the space for sidenotes, on particularly sidenote-heavy pages like _Radiance_ https://www.gwern.net/docs/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance they would wind up being stacked in the only margin for long enough that they would be off-screen, even. Maybe that's acceptable, but it's enough of a drawback that we haven't pursued it.

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