How the Web Became Unreadable • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#151

Post by pc2g4d » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 6:43 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #67

jonstokes wrote: post #55

Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…

>You know what works? Craiglist, that's what works. Reddit works. Hacker News works. Political views aside (and the post doesn't concern those either), this is quite relevant: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1407-why-the-drudge-report-is...

But the mobile experience sucks :-(

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#152

Post by Declanomous » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

puddintane wrote: post #91

speeder wrote: post #87

I am using in a still under construction pc a CRT screen. Two things became obvious: 1. CRT contrast is amazing, specially black levels. DOOM 4 is utterly gorgeous. 2. Yet CRT is now mostly unusable because questionable design decisions, I keep stumbling in new games and websites that presume you have a 4k monitor (seriously, I saw some games where the UI on my screen ended with letters unreadable without a loupe...)…

CRT is also not as good for your eyes and therefore isn't as suitable as LCD [1]. [1] http://superuser.com/a/389678 Some may argue as well that you can obtain better contrast in LCD but I'm no expert in that matter - I have just learned why CRTs are bad due to working as a programmer.

I used to get eyestrain after about an hour of using a CRT. I can (and do) sit and look at an LCD all day without eye strain. I still get eyestrain if I'm using a monitor with PWN brightness control. That's easily fixed by turning up the brightness to max, or choosing a well-designed LCD from the start.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#153

Post by amelius » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #98

throwawayReply wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't require strong AI, firefox reader view achieves that without strong AI. It even preserves article images nicely.

See also: Readability, a project first discussed on HN some 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970

Does it perform OCR? Because if not, then the content industry will circumvent it by rendering the text as images.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#154

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

Declanomous wrote: post #146

digi_owl wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard, basically from the horses mouth, that users are idiots. The Gnome devs apparently did some usability testing, and came away with that opinion...

So gnome devs treat their users like morons. Their users leave to use KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, etc, and find the desktop environment satisfactory. I think this says more about the devs than it does the desktop environment, unless the fact that GNOME used to ship with Ubuntu skewed things.

Dunno about KDE, they seem to be following in Gnome's footsteps these days. As for XFCE and Cinnamon, they have limited options as more and more Gnome assumptions gets baked into GTK (vanishing scrollbars anyone?). Our best bet may be XLQT, but they were lacking in manpower.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#155

Post by digi_owl » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 6:49 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #134

digi_owl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the other end, if we don't learn form history we are stuck repeating it.

We did learn from history. Go back 15 years the web look wastely different and has actually improved quite a lot.

Jonstokes' rant further up seems to indicate otherwise...

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#156

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

kps wrote: post #137

dredmorbius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shifting the background colour, slightly , tends to be vastly more readable than screwing with the foreground colour: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/ It also far more closely approaches the appearance of print on somewhat aged paper: https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/5...

It's not aged paper, necessarily; look at any well-made book (excluding glossy picture books) and the paper will be stable and opaque but not bright.

I'm spending a lot of time going through Internet Archive books (the one indicated has relevance to the whole advertising-supported nature of the Internet as well, I submitted it as an HN article earlier today). So I'm somewhat attuned to the visual appearance.

Different paper ages differently, and I believe that much of the highly-yellowed paper is high-pulp content, as opposed to archival-quality, acid-free rag. The degree of yellowing can vary, and in some cases it's rather more than I'd prefer for comfortable reading. In modest amounts, it's not bad though.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#157

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #131

dredmorbius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shifting the background colour, slightly , tends to be vastly more readable than screwing with the foreground colour: https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/ It also far more closely approaches the appearance of print on somewhat aged paper: https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/5...

Actually, the link you showed has the colors #16110b and #e3d2ae for text and background. I might just use that in future websites.

The Codepen actually shows what I use and prefer. The IA book example was just to show a typical example. The yellowing there is a bit too strong IMO.

You might poke around and look at a number of books and see what particular shadings after actually having read content you prefer.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#158

Post by ThomPete » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 7:11 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #155

ThomPete wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did learn from history. Go back 15 years the web look wastely different and has actually improved quite a lot.

Jonstokes' rant further up seems to indicate otherwise...

It's a rant not the truth. There are plenty of well designed websites out there which doesn't actually make those mistakes and I believe the rant to be saturating the actual reality.

Pointing to a few examples are nothing but anecdotal evidence.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#159

Post by onli » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 7:12 PM UTC

liveoneggs wrote: post #116

onli wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. But modern web design is the contrary. Large big webfonts, distinct ones for headlines and text as beautiful as possible. Yes, sometimes the text is then made grey and oftentimes this is just bad design, but I don't think the texture comaprision is accurate. Here for example, in…

> Large big webfonts I think you're confusing filesize with font size. :)

;) That only as well. I mean, just look at https://www.apple.com/iphone/. The page is defined by images and big headlines.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#160

Post by mikeleeorg » Wed, Oct 19, 2016, 7:23 PM UTC

I have grown to really love Pocket because it makes reading online articles so much easier and more enjoyable. And bumping up font sizes on unreadable sites is such a common habit of mine now.