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Also restated here: https://www.swyx.io/css-100-bytes
Does anyone know what theme that blog is using? It looks really nice.
it's a handrolled theme, with a lot of inspo from @leerob of vercel. i keep a clonable version here https://github.com/sw-yx/swyxkit/
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I almost agree, but there’s a difference between number of characters and width, and also graphics and tables are a different beast. Personally, I think websites should fill up the available space, increasing font size if it makes sense, perhaps using resizing images. So, no - text should not be constrained to a maximum width. If width were a problem, billboards wouldn’t be a thing.
Have you ever seen a long text on a billboard? I guess not.
> there’s a difference between number of characters and width
Billboards use large letters to fill the space, but normally they would be readable on a business card.
Is there a html/css only way to automatically “columnize” text into multiple columns of reasonable width?
You probably don't want to apply it to a whole document because then you need to scroll back to the top to read the second half. But it can be effective to columnize text sections between headings.
It seems like I'm permanently in some sort of dystopian nightmare 'unpopular opinion' group where wasting two thirds of my monitors useful space is the right way about doing things. I have monitors either side of my primary in portrait mode specifically for looking at a bunch of code/text and it still wastes at least half of the useful display area. https://i.imgur.com/Qk7fM35.png If I wanted this, I'd press the read…
Besides, the other half of my monitor is usually taken up by another window or two.
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Have you ever seen a long text on a billboard? I guess not.
I'm pretty sure you misunderstood what I wrote. > there’s a difference between number of characters and width Billboards use large letters to fill the space, but normally they would be readable on a business card.
You seem to suggest that fontsize should adapt to width to fill the space (seemingly to a billboard, as per your example).
If the billboard technique was used on the web, I guess we might not have more than a handful of lines on screen (on a 16:10 or so). That would disable skimming on long texts and even more, barely display a single paragraph (that's a gut guessing).
Plus, and more importantly, the distance to the screen is such that a font too big is not more readable. There's a tradeoff to he found for the fontsize that not only has to take into account the size of the screen but also the distance of the reader from the medium.
Or so I assume.
It seems like I'm permanently in some sort of dystopian nightmare 'unpopular opinion' group where wasting two thirds of my monitors useful space is the right way about doing things. I have monitors either side of my primary in portrait mode specifically for looking at a bunch of code/text and it still wastes at least half of the useful display area. https://i.imgur.com/Qk7fM35.png If I wanted this, I'd press the read…
yep. I hate it. I've seen people say this is a result of studies but I've never been able to find the studies that claim this is better. It seems to have been stated in elements of typographic style and taken as truth http://webtypography.net/2.1.2
There are many citations that lead to other studies on the same topic.
Love things like this. This is why I can't stop reading HN. I disagree about the font-size. I say go very small (pack more info on a screen). Very easy for people to make it bigger. People have known this for hundreds of years (old newspapers pack in the text, older readers can wear spectacles or use magnifying glass).
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In theory sites could optimize for wide screens by adding columns, but 1) its a very small audience 2) most content is not suitable for that (how would you scroll a feed that spans 3 columns?)
https://www.nasm.us/xdoc/2.15.05/html/nasmdoc2.html The NASM website is an example of this. Personally, I don't like it and would prefer a single column.
Proper column layout involves limiting columns to screen height, probably by paginating. Then the reader can perceive the text as a tree of Page > Column > Paragraph > Row. Tangentially, I think there are studies positing that this, helped by the notion of physical pages in space, is what's behind the readability advantage of books.
Alternative to pagination is scroll-direction: horizontal. Now the experience is even closer to reading a book. And to Windows 8! IMO there's a shortage of novelty sites with true (non-slideshow or carousel) horizontal scrolling.
Not explicitly mentioned here, but worth bringing up: Text width should always be constrained to a maximum width to optimize for human reading. Every book ever printed has text with set within the same range for a reason. Full width text guarantees most users will have a poor reading experience.