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Some news from LWN

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Re: Some news from LWN

#121

Post by brazzledazzle »

josteink wrote: post #112
Svenskunganka wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really have to make it look "current" to make it better. I think a good example is antirez blog: http://antirez.com/latest/0 It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No distracting content, proper font and font spacing.

And has terrible contrast on the main page content's text making it hard to read if you have poor eyesight, poor light conditions or a poor monitor. This would probably fail a basic Universal Accessibility test based on that alone.

Not seeing what you're describing either.

Re: Some news from LWN

#122

Post by benaiah »

josteink wrote: post #112
Svenskunganka wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really have to make it look "current" to make it better. I think a good example is antirez blog: http://antirez.com/latest/0 It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No distracting content, proper font and font spacing.

And has terrible contrast on the main page content's text making it hard to read if you have poor eyesight, poor light conditions or a poor monitor. This would probably fail a basic Universal Accessibility test based on that alone.

What are you talking about? The text on that page is pure black (rgb(0,0,0)) on pure white (rgba(0,0,0,0)). You literally can't get more contrast without coloring either the text or the background. This contrast circlejerk is getting incredibly annoying.

Re: Some news from LWN

#123

Post by brazzledazzle »

hehheh wrote: post #70
sotojuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time someone says a website should update their look people think they mean it should look like Medium and be brigaded by design school freshmen who'll make the page weigh 900gb. I don't know what the original commenter meant, but the text could be a bit bigger and the line lengths and spacing controlled. The comment metadata could be shortened and humanized, though the audience may find it useful. There's some…

You created a strawman argument (y'all want it to be 900gb!) and then counter it yourself with some reasonable suggestions that others here have made as well.

I don't think it's fair to accuse them of strawmanning. They did make it clear that they might be unfairly attributing the argument to the original commenter.

Re: Some news from LWN

#124

Post by joshuata »

Svenskunganka wrote: post #87
wtbob wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, l…

You don't really have to make it look "current" to make it better. I think a good example is antirez blog: http://antirez.com/latest/0 It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No distracting content, proper font and font spacing.

It's actually very problematic from an accessibility standpoint. The entire text of each post is a single pre tag which makes it almost impossible to use with a screen reader. This is exactly why there were complaints about fancy style on websites; it often ruins the structural markup of a page.

Re: Some news from LWN

#125

Post by Gigablah »

josteink wrote: post #112
Svenskunganka wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really have to make it look "current" to make it better. I think a good example is antirez blog: http://antirez.com/latest/0 It's clean, very simple and renders fine in everything, even mobile. No distracting content, proper font and font spacing.

And has terrible contrast on the main page content's text making it hard to read if you have poor eyesight, poor light conditions or a poor monitor. This would probably fail a basic Universal Accessibility test based on that alone.

It's black and white on my MBP (Chrome). Maybe your browser is the one messing it up.

Re: Some news from LWN

#126

Post by akx »

wtbob wrote: post #21
bflesch wrote: post #4

I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years. I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the s…

> I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Say what? On the contrary, I think that it's splendidly simple to read LWN, because there's no distraction. It's a good, clean site; it respects the styling I instruct my browser to apply to it; it displays just fine in links, l…

Oh, I'll bite. It took me 15 minutes and 44 lines of CSS to make it look significantly more 2010s (and dare I say it, more readable): http://i.imgur.com/LAhwht5.png

Re: Some news from LWN

#127

Post by pnathan »

bflesch wrote: post #4

I've never been a subscriber of this page and I don't think I am their real target audience. But I'm a professional programmer and I have been using Linux for around 15 years. I must say that this website comes across as very unprofessional due to the total lack of any design elements which would make it more easy to consume the content (spacing, choice of font). Also it seems like they don't use CSS to enhance the s…

Really? Designer zing connotes to me a focus on the superficial... the shinier the website, the less useful the content, IME :-/

Re: Some news from LWN

#128

Post by dublinben »

Analemma_ wrote: post #118
tlrobinson wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the years of occasionally reading LWN articles I've never noticed, or at least internalized, that LWN is subscription supported. Not saying they should introduce annoying "subscribe now!" modals, but they definitely could sell it a little harder.

LWN articles are paywalled, but subscribers can generate public "subscriber links", which are the ones that get shared to HN. This is such a double-edged sword: it's great for visibility, but as you've shown, it means people can read your content for a long time and never even know that subscriptions are available. That trend only gets stronger as more people go through aggregators like HN/Reddit. Hopefully "pledge d…

They could make it significantly more clear that you are viewing a free preview, provided by the subscriber who shared it with you. It seems like a lost opportunity for conversions to omit this from the page.

Re: Some news from LWN

#129

Post by roryokane »

mherdeg wrote: post #52

There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it ( http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/ ). I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a…

There is a link to subscribe within the article body; it's just named "subscription" instead of "subscribe":

> LWN is, of course, a [subscription]-supported operation.

But I agree that's it's not a strong call for action, and that it's hard to search for if you overlooked that sentence.

Re: Some news from LWN

#130

Post by stronglikedan »

randac wrote: post #60
mherdeg wrote: post #52

There is no "Subscribe" link anywhere in the text of this article or on the web page that hosts it ( http://lwn.net/Articles/696017/ ). I was able to find the link from the front page, but it's kind of hidden -- https://lwn.net/subscribe/Info which says "Get started! The first step is to log into LWN. If you do not yet have an account, please create one now; otherwise, please log in to continue:". Which seems like a…

At least they tell you the price before making you create a login! I ran into this gem recently: https://www.flograppling.com/signup?next=/

But how are they going to get you to opt-in to their spam, if they show you the prices first?
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