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Plain Text Sports

plaintextsports.com

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Re: Plain Text Sports

#41

Post by lelandfe »

kevincox wrote: post #28
lelandfe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues. I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practic…

I'm sure I have "problems" quite often but the sites listed are quite readable. Sure, I would prefer them to use my default font size but something with their contrast, font or otherwise seems to make it not stand out. > non-default font-size users like yourself What does this even mean? The default font is being overridden and irreverent here. Are you suggesting that there is a default default font that is expected…

> Are you suggesting that there is a default default font

Yes, the `font-size` value when you freshly install the browser: 16px. This changeable value had a lot of historical importance, as it was the only way users could scale sites up.

Good Samaritan CSS authors had to write not only all font-sizes in percentages or em's to respect that value (rem came later) but also think about things like min/max-widths, padding/margin, breakpoints, etc. Folks would later use pixel-to-em converter functions in early tools like Bourbon and Compass. You can still find old polemics on authoring explicit pixel values from folks like Jakob Nielsen[0].

These days, Cmd-+ in browsers zooms instead of scales font-size, and things just work out nicely: padding and margins magically grow, breakpoints trigger as expected, etc. As a result, direct font-size adjustments have gone from living in the taskbar in IE4 to being buried in Google Chrome in Preferences > Appearance > Font Size.

In my opinion, it's for the best. Users aren't left out in the cold by nonconforming CSS, and CSS devs don't have to do battle with scalable values.

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/let-users-control-font-size...

Re: Plain Text Sports

#42

Post by caslon »

CJefferson wrote: post #38

This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website). If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rathe…

Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface?

Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down.

Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static.

Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check the results of any mainstream sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to get search engines to give you a page where you can find results.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#43

Post by erickhill »

oneplane wrote: post #20
erickhill wrote: post #19

Sadly, it's https. So a lot of older computers that still live and breathe off of sites like this (see: 68k.news) can't access it due to the bizarre (or Google pressured) security certificate ... for a sports scores site.

That's nonsense and you know it. If you really want to use plain-text web access you can run a local decryption proxy outside of your low-power old computers and use them as if it's 1989.

I actually have no idea what you just said (and you can believe it). But I'll Google "local decryption proxy" and see if that's something feasible I could try with, say, my Powerbook Pismo running macOS 9.2 with no modern browsers. I'm no engineer, so please don't assume everyone here is.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#44

Post by compsciphd »

Back in 1997 I was studying overseas and we didn't have internet access, but we did have e-mail access over uucp. There was a service back then which would end you a text mode version of a web page (which would probably be much harder today, as users of w3m or links could attest) and we'd have it setup to email us the scores every night.

25 year younger me would have loved this site for that. :)

Re: Plain Text Sports

#45

Post by TAKEMYMONEY »

caslon wrote: post #42
CJefferson wrote: post #38

This does look really nice, and the author should be proud, however I wanted to make a general comment (which isn't a critism of this website). If you aim is to help people who want pure text-based interfaces (the blind in particular), this is much worse than a proper HTML page, which they can easily explore by headers. Well-formed HTML is actually one of the most accessible formats, and drawing boxes with CSS (rathe…

Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface? Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down. Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static. Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check…

This site is HTML, replacing with wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans.

Plain text is good because it

1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily

s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike.

Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit. Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do) and it's a non-starter.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#48

Post by lc9er »

goblinux wrote: post #15

Beautiful. I love it! Dark mode is beautiful. So very well done. This went right to the top of my bookmark list. Only constructive feedback would be if it can better fill a normal 16:9 desktop monitor - it looks optimized for mobile, which is great - but it's too small and narrow for keeping open on the PC If you like MLB - this reminds me of Playball which runs in the terminal. https://github.com/paaatrick/playball

This is really great. Thanks for posting it.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#49

Post by hnarn »

As a Swede, seeing Americans react to this website is interesting. Sweden introduced "Text-TV" in 1979 (it was pioneered by the BBC in the early 70's I believe), which means that reading text based sports results on your TV is a completely ubiquitous cultural phenomenon for anyone who grew up in Sweden in the 80's, the 90's and all the way up to when the Internet and smartphones took over.

Swedish state television (SVT) still provide "Text-TV" online at https://www.svt.se/text-tv -- many Swedes including myself still know some of the numbers by heart, 100 being the index and 377 being the favorite page of dads all over the country (live sports results).

I vividly remember being a kid (before DSL broadband or even dial-up was a thing in my life) flipping through the pages and guessing numbers between 100 and 999 to see where I would end up, long before I would end up doing the same thing on the early Internet.

SVT's "Text-TV" is to my knowledge still the worlds oldest, operational service of its kind.

Re: Plain Text Sports

#50

Post by TAKEMYMONEY »

lelandfe wrote: post #26
kevincox wrote: post #5

Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display. Of course removing the override breaks it because it has a max-width set in px. But why does it have a max-width? It is important not to have long lines of text but there are no long lines on this page, each box has it's own size. So by removing font-size and max-width rules this is far more readable for me. And while I'm at it don't forc…

> Does it really need to override my font size? 13px is too small for my display The advent of good browser-based zooming has made non-default font-size users like yourself a small segment. The days of having to author everything in em/rem is mostly over – keeping everything scalable was tedious and prone to issues. I'd bet you encounter issues regularly: explicit font sizes on a root element are a ubiquitous practic…

How do you persist zoom settings for every website across browsers and devices?
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