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The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#321

Post by GoblinSlayer »

SquareWheel wrote: post #278
TeMPOraL wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that was the original goal. Sadly, the marketing people won and turned the web into a glorified magazine delivery service. Remember when browsers supported user styles out of the box and put them in a somewhat discoverable location?

I remember users setting their default font sizes to 30px, then complaining when they hit the one piece of text on a website with an undefined text size. User-defined formatting hasn't worked since CSS was introduced.

Works for me much better than CSS. HN sets font size to 10pt, any user setting is better than that.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#322

Post by auggierose »

pvorb wrote: post #290
scrollaway wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDFs can be accessible, and many of them are! Everyone who works with PDF needs to know about PDF/A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A PDF/A is a small family of sub-formats to PDFs which amount to the accessible subset of PDF + some requirements. PDF/A and PDF/UA are mandated by a variety of governments for PDF distribution. They're very suitable to archival and are accessible (screenreaders can work with them, th…

That might be true, but these ones are not . I can't efficiently read them on my smartphone and have to scroll around a lot. They also show two pages on one, probably to be better printable for some marketing material, but I would never want to print a PDF that's mostly black, because that would overwhelm my printer. I'm also not near a printer right now. This is clearly inaccessible to me. HTML, on the other side, c…

PDFs are often the BEST way to read something. I prefer PDF text books over any other format, because (not very good) computer algorithms laying out text is inferior to proper professional layout.

Why would you read PDFs on a smart phone anyway?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#323

Post by GoblinSlayer »

12ian34 wrote: post #201
ryandrake wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen. 1: https://daringfireball.n…

I used to think this, but after really trying to assess the difference in some examples I made myself, I was converted. Have you seriously tried yourself to read two identical blocks of text, one at full screen width (I tested 100% zoom Wikipedia on a 1440p, 27" screen at standard DPI) and one at a width of about 55 characters on the same screen? Have a go. I find it easier to locate the next line after finishing one…

Tried to read PDF with text formatted in 3 thin columns per page, it's absolutely unreadable.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#324

Post by rob74 »

Hmmm, starting out with a description of what the plebes do in the housing benefit offices. Then mentioning in passing that his "old car" is a BMW i3 (can I have that old car? Oh, he was only test driving it...). This juxtaposition doesn't really endear the author to me. Ok, maybe I'm not getting the British sense of humour... he does have a point however!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#325

Post by pwdisswordfish6 »

jedimastert wrote: post #138
ryandrake wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that bettermotherfuckingwebsite is worse in almost all ways. I wonder if that was what the author was going for. I don't know what's truly satire anymore!

> worse in almost all ways How so? I dislike the text color choice, but other than that it seems perfectly fine to me.

That alone is bad enough!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#326

Post by GoblinSlayer »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #235
dvdkon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because once one site starts needing X px, most users will just keep their browser at least X px wide. At some point X became so close to the monitor's resolution that not maximising the window is just extra work. I'm not happy about having to maximise my browser, but I would be less happy about having to scroll horizontally. There are definitely some people who just maximise everything out of habit, but I don't thin…

No, I actually don't think websites have much of a problem with this. I generally keep my browser around 1,000 pixels wide (more or less depending on what I"m doing), and websites generally work fine. Responsive design helps a lot, as you say. What surprises me is how many users seem to keep their browsers maximized at all times, particularly on desktop-sized displays! I'm pretty sure I see people doing it more on Wi…

I do it only for pdf, because pdf is written in small text and the only way to fix it is to zoom the entire thing, but it can't reflow text and zooms like a picture, but browser just reflows text according to its size.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#327

Post by JonNordland »

rob74 wrote: post #324

Hmmm, starting out with a description of what the plebes do in the housing benefit offices. Then mentioning in passing that his "old car" is a BMW i3 (can I have that old car? Oh, he was only test driving it...). This juxtaposition doesn't really endear the author to me. Ok, maybe I'm not getting the British sense of humour... he does have a point however!

I might be misunderstanding you, but it seems that you feel the author tried to sneak in a brag, by telling us he owns a i3. Not to be disparaging i3, but it's not here bragging car. It goes for 11,5k USD in Norway.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#328

Post by lmm »

fouric wrote: post #90
theandrewbailey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Embedded javascript to make them responsive. We must have different definitions of 'responsive'. You don't need javascript to make a website look different due to different screen sizes.

What if you do, though? Flexbox is a CSS 3 feature. Support appears to have been implemented in FF and Chrome around 2012-2014 and still doesn't fully work in IE[1]. The fact that a site uses CSS and HTML instead of Javascript does not imply that it's easier for older browsers to display. Javascript 1.0 was released in 1996. [1] https://caniuse.com/flexbox

Fortunately there's a practical way to do properly responsive layouts that will work in any browser even from before 1996: HTML tables.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#329

Post by GoblinSlayer »

callmeal wrote: post #159
ryandrake wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly most is just personal preference but the line width thing is the cardinal sin. Forcing huge blocks of whitespace on either side of the text for nebulous "readability" reasons is just wasteful. Too many web sites ape this pattern too. Look at John Gruber's website [1] on a nice wide 27" monitor for an extreme example. The content takes up less than 1/5 of the width of the screen. 1: https://daringfireball.n…

There's two ways of reading - scrolling your eyes from side to side, then down, or just scrolling down with your eyes (no side-to-side). Smaller widths make it easier for the "read the whole line in one glance" readers and is I think the main reason for this confusion. Sometimes I like just glancing down a page and getting the gist of the screen. Other times I prefer to let my eyes do extra work and read denser text.

Short lines can't be read in one glance, they are too short to be meaningful, so when you see it in one glance, you get no information from it. The worst case is when the line stops in the middle of a word, now you can't even see individual words in one glance.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

#330

Post by lmm »

Making things work on crappy browsers is definitely important. But that doesn't always mean "simple HTML", and it definitely doesn't mean avoiding react or jQuery or whatever HN framework hipsters are complaining about this week - if anything, those popular, "bloated" frameworks are more likely to have been tested on these obscure browsers and have whatever workarounds you didn't think of. It might not even mean following "web standards"; frankly I've found writing HTML3 with no CSS, table layouts, and maybe even the occasional works a lot better on these old browsers than flexbox, semantic tags, or whatever the overengineers are trying to push these days.

The bottom line is right; rather than posturing, test your site - actually test it - on one of these browsers.

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