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Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

#21

Post by pg »

alabut wrote: post #3

I haven't seen a rationale for it yet but I'd guess that it's a subtle way of encouraging descriptions to be short (like the one you just wrote), it's probably intentional that it's hard to read long rambling posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468139 I read a pg comment somewhere that makes me think that's his design decision - he already weighs "Ask HN" type of posts differently than the standard one wit…

Yes; I do this to discourage people from making too many such posts, and making them too long. I don't want HN to turn into a blogging platform. Also, I wanted to make it easy to tell these posts from comments. If I made the text black I'd have to make it smaller, and then it would look just like a comment.

But I'm not wedded to the current way of doing things. I'd be open to alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

#22

Post by jpcosta »

jeroen wrote: post #19

For firefox, put this in your user stylesheet @-moz-document url-prefix( http://news.ycombinator.com/) { td { color: #000000 !important; } td.subtext { color: #828282 !important; } } see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467680 for more info.

This is a neat idea but it's no good for me because I read HN from several places and I don't want to manually create a user style sheet in each one.

Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

#26

Post by alabut »

kennyroo wrote: post #6

Light gray text is a DTD (designer-transmitted disease) that's rapidly infecting sites across the Internet. (When it's really light, I use Firebug to modify the CSS.)

Easy on the anti-designer bigotry there, dude, it's only the crappy designers that use super low contrast text just because they think it's cool. That's not the case here - see my comment below and pg's confirmation for a rational discussion behind its usage here on HN, it's a very intentional decision and serves the intent well.

Now whether the intent is right or not (should HN morph more into a Metafilter-like free-for-all message board for hacker types, rather than a structured conversation around links?) is a different discussion. I like the current orientation towards news.

Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

#27

Post by alabut »

mattmcknight wrote: post #18
zepolen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was in fact the post that triggered this one. I gave up reading it after the second paragraph. However it was mainly because I wasn't interested in the topic, but had checked all the other articles out. There are some long self posts that are genuinely interesting to read and it still hurts my eyes to read them.

Maybe it should get progressively more grey then as you get longer and longer.

Very interesting idea. Do you mean each paragraph in a post gets lighter as it goes on or the color for the entire comment block fades depending on overall length?

Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

#28

Post by alabut »

roberto wrote: post #8
alabut wrote: post #3

I haven't seen a rationale for it yet but I'd guess that it's a subtle way of encouraging descriptions to be short (like the one you just wrote), it's probably intentional that it's hard to read long rambling posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468139 I read a pg comment somewhere that makes me think that's his design decision - he already weighs "Ask HN" type of posts differently than the standard one wit…

Then limit the size of the textarea or something like that. It's bad usage, and saying that "it's a feature, not a bug" doesn't help.

Not sure that limiting the textarea would help - it's not like it constrains the length of these replies, for example. It's pretty trivial to compose a block of text in Textmate and paste it in, I'll often do that just for the spell checking or to make sure it doesn't get lost in submission or browser crash or whatever. (and often to review and make sure I don't post something I'll regret)

Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

#29

Post by alabut »

pg wrote: post #21
alabut wrote: post #3

I haven't seen a rationale for it yet but I'd guess that it's a subtle way of encouraging descriptions to be short (like the one you just wrote), it's probably intentional that it's hard to read long rambling posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468139 I read a pg comment somewhere that makes me think that's his design decision - he already weighs "Ask HN" type of posts differently than the standard one wit…

Yes; I do this to discourage people from making too many such posts, and making them too long. I don't want HN to turn into a blogging platform. Also, I wanted to make it easy to tell these posts from comments. If I made the text black I'd have to make it smaller, and then it would look just like a comment. But I'm not wedded to the current way of doing things. I'd be open to alternatives.

The fact that people are complaining about not being able to read longer blocks of text means it's working just fine. And it's a nice subtle touch - I never consciously considered why I tend to ignore rambling posts and stick to the discussion area instead until now.
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