Looks nice, but I would prefer true minimalism. That is, something similar, but without necessaty to use additional 500-line CSS (God! Please, kill this format in the most painful way!) and other a d d i t i o n a l stuff that is used to get a minimalistic look-and-feel. What we really need is something like a POSIX standard for web. We don't need to re-invent the wheel for this. Just take HTML4, CSS2, and so on.
The Monospace Web
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: The Monospace Web
#112While I haven't officially launched https://lmno.lol blogging platform and not exactly monospaced, it shares much of the site's simplicity. You can view my blog at https://lmno.lol/alvaro (powered by a single markdown file). You can already play with the platform without signing in, but if you're keen to start blogging today, ping help\at\lmno.lol and I'll share an invite code.
Re: The Monospace Web
#113Alright, before I continue my comment. I love the look and overall feel of the website. From an aesthetics point of view, I think it looks awesome. However... this sentence > Maybe we’re just brainwashed from spending years in terminals? Made me go ... Ugh... Yes, I very much think so. To be fair, they do a fairly good job with the monospaced font they are using on this website, which is fairly legible. They also see…
Maybe decades worth of research aren't worth anything and it all comes down to personal preferences and what you are used too (i.e. resistance to change)? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: The Monospace Web
#114It looks nice, and I'm glad that it's semantic and responsive, but the fundamental problem is that monospace just isn't great for body text. I've read blog posts on multiple sites with monospaced body text, it's okay, but proportional really is the way to go in my opinion.
Agreed. It has started bothering me for authoring Markdown documents as well, where it’s often impractical to avoid monospace.
Some Markdown editors defaults to using a proportional type face for body text. Quite nice! Typora is one of them, there are probably others.
Re: The Monospace Web
#115The tight line spacing has a negative impact on readability. It’s hard to read long paragraphs of dense body text like this. But the tables and other character graphics require this tight leading. That’s the problem with using the same character grid for both graphics and text. It could be alleviated with a font that has a particularly low x-height (leaving more margin above and below the letters).
Is it the tight line-height, or just the fact that monospace fonts a more difficult to read than proportional fonts (due to monospace words have a more similar 'shape' than proportional type words)
IMHO it’s the latter.
Re: The Monospace Web
#116Main problem is I guess the website would be broken the moment the user choose the setting to use his preferred font on the browser and do not use a monospace one.
Firefox allows users to choose a global preferred font, but also individual Serif, Sans-Serif, and Monospace preferred fonts. Which means this site, which correctly specifies `monospace` as a font fallback, does show correctly in my preferred monospace font.
Good point.
Re: The Monospace Web
#117Looks nice, but I would prefer true minimalism. That is, something similar, but without necessaty to use additional 500-line CSS (God! Please, kill this format in the most painful way!) and other a d d i t i o n a l stuff that is used to get a minimalistic look-and-feel. What we really need is something like a POSIX standard for web. We don't need to re-invent the wheel for this. Just take HTML4, CSS2, and so on.
Came here to say this. Believe we've had it all along, since Nestcape won on being the big size :P
Specifically, I want a monospaced site to display in the monospace font I choose for my browser. Because that's what I like reading.
Re: The Monospace Web
#118Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in monospace font, and it was full justified perfectly all the way through (thousands of lines!) SOLELY through word choice. Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?
Here is another ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. For years I wanted to make a Visual Studio [Code] extension that justifies comments as you type including hyphenation but accepting additional spaces as necessary. I never dared to really start beyond some research into relevant algorithms and libraries because it seems pretty complex. I tried to use things like fmt and par but mostly accepted that I can…
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rew...
I use this extension extensively. It's not auto-wrapping, but you can bind it to an easy shortcut and wrap when you need to. I find it almost indispensable. I wrote a vscode extension to do the same thing, then discovered this one which does it far better.
Re: The Monospace Web
#119Alright, before I continue my comment. I love the look and overall feel of the website. From an aesthetics point of view, I think it looks awesome. However... this sentence > Maybe we’re just brainwashed from spending years in terminals? Made me go ... Ugh... Yes, I very much think so. To be fair, they do a fairly good job with the monospaced font they are using on this website, which is fairly legible. They also see…
Maybe decades worth of research aren't worth anything and it all comes down to personal preferences and what you are used too (i.e. resistance to change)? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Your comment is a perfect example of why the wheel gets reinvented so often.
Part of it is preference, sort of. A specific crowd of people, many of who visit HN, are used to looking at monospaced fonts. So, they have effectively been trained to be able to deal with it more.
That still doesn't mean that, even for them, the text done with best practices wouldn't be easier to read.
Finally, as you might have noticed I also explicitly mentioned writing for a broader audience. Because people that are not working with code, terminals, etc all are not used to monospaced fonts.
Re: The Monospace Web
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The page loads a webfont (Jetbrains Mono) with 4 different weights, for a total payload of 725KB. Looking light and being light are 2 different things.
The problem is mostly with how fonts are packaged, because even if you serve WOFF and WOFF2 in addition to fallbacks like TTF, then the font will most likely include a whole bunch of symbols that you won’t actually display. A way around this would be to split the font into multiple subsets based on unicode-range, like how Google Fonts do it: https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Open+Sans&display=s... Sadly, I nev…
Or he could have just used "font-family: monospace;" and let the user's system font stack render it.