I like using a simple CTRL+A to highlight all text on page; (windows xp, ff3.05)
Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#32If you browse with opera try view-style and select the option that suits your needs.
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#33Light 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.)
Remember CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) and The Zen of CSS Design book? And Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)? Way cool when cutting edge designers were figuring out what CSS 2.1 is capable of. But such low contrast! And lots of tan. Then the candy-colors-on-white "Web 2.0" look hit... Another year, another DTD.
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#34I think reading the light gray is a problem.
Obviously there are other design considerations - personally I'd go a little darker!
.. or to be really geeky, add a button to darken the color in the menu bar (simply change the .css with a little javascript!)
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#35I 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.
It seems like this system punishes me, the reader, for something that the poster did wrong. If the poster is supposed to write his long rants on his blog and then link them here, the software should tell him. It shouldn't subtly make his stuff harder for me to read, because if I'm interested, I'm going to push through the low contrast text anyway.
Anyway, if you want to nurture the community, I don't think it's a bad idea to make the feedback deliberate. "This is too long, don't post it," will be a lot more effective than changing the color of the text.
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#36The factory settings of most LCD's is WAY too bright. Try dimming your screen a little. I have no trouble reading it at all.
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
I believe that this form submits to a process on a server that could limit the number of characters that are allowed in the textarea.
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#38Bookmarklet: javascript:var%20l=document.getElementsByTagName("TD");for(var%20i=0;i<l.length;i++)%20l[i].style.color='#000'
I use the Zap Colors bookmarklet from http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/the-zap-colors-bookmarkle...
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#39Use your mouse to quickly highlight the text. Now you can read it as light grey on blue, which is much easier.
I get a weird bright yellow on dark gray, which is even harder to read
Re: Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.
#40For 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.
Or if you're like me and find all the white backgrounds hurt your eyes, its simple to enforce black background / green text which makes reading much easier on the eyes, it also makes grey text easier to read.