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How the Web Became Unreadable

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Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#81

Post by jasode »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #68
sthatipamala wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually their term for high DPI displays. If you want to be pedantic, at least be correct.

Speaking of pedantic, what is the difference between "high resolution screens" and "high DPI screens"? Assuming, of course, that screen and display mean the same thing.

2560x1440 is ~109 dpi when the pixels are arranged to fill a 27" monitor. (This is not considered "Retina".)

2560x1440 is ~500 dpi when the pixels are squeezed into a 6" phone display such as as Google Nexus 6/6P.

The "Retina" description refers to the dpi exceeding 300 dpi and not the absolute # of pixels.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#82

Post by [deleted] »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #68
sthatipamala wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually their term for high DPI displays. If you want to be pedantic, at least be correct.

Speaking of pedantic, what is the difference between "high resolution screens" and "high DPI screens"? Assuming, of course, that screen and display mean the same thing.

[deleted]

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#84

Post by zephyrfalcon »

franciscop wrote: post #17

I have worried about this a lot, but basically now try to get inspiration and take example from webs that I consider highly readable. I also developed a set of internal rules; for instance, my maximum "black" is #333 (#333333) and my minimum "white" is #eee (#EEEEEE). Anything going further than these to the middle should have a real reason and not just because it's prettier . Edit: #333 over a #eee (worst-case scena…

For some reason, the article itself uses #333333 for its text. (Because of antialiasing, most of the pixels that make up the text are actually (much) lighter than this, at least on my system...)

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#85

Post by Crespyl »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #68
sthatipamala wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually their term for high DPI displays. If you want to be pedantic, at least be correct.

Speaking of pedantic, what is the difference between "high resolution screens" and "high DPI screens"? Assuming, of course, that screen and display mean the same thing.

"High resolution" could mean any display >= 1080p or so, whatever size (6 inches, or 6 feet).

DPI, being "dots per inch" relates to resolution for a given physical size, so a "low resolution" 720p display that was only 1 inch across would have a high DPI (in this case, 720 dots per inch), but a "high resolution" 4k display at 50 feet across would have a low DPI.

Generally speaking, the higher the DPI the harder it is to discern individual pixels, and the better for viewing fine details.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#86

Post by lemmings19 »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #68
sthatipamala wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its actually their term for high DPI displays. If you want to be pedantic, at least be correct.

Speaking of pedantic, what is the difference between "high resolution screens" and "high DPI screens"? Assuming, of course, that screen and display mean the same thing.

High DPI refers to a high pixel density. High resolution refers many pixels.

If I have one million pixels on a 10cm by 10cm screen, and one million pixels on a 100cm by 100cm screen, they both have the same resolution because they both have the same number of pixels.

However, the 10cm screen has a much higher pixel density because the pixels are much smaller and closer together in order to fit on such a small surface.

The effect of a high pixel density is that you cannot tell pixels apart because they are so small and clustered, even up close. This results in a much more fine looking image.

'Retina' is just a marketing term for high DPI displays.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#87

Post by speeder »

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...) and presume you have a specific type of lcd, and thus rely heavily on subpixel anti alias that beside obvious looking outright broken on crt with deformed letters, also look wrong on panels that aren't classic lcd or have a unusual pixel organization (for example a panel that instead of rgb in horizontal is gbr, or vertical, or a triangle, or those cheap mobile panels with less blue pixels)

One of the things that most piss me off are windows new default font, that was designed to only look good on lcd. And all those custom web fonts, sometimes gigantic, so you see for example a newspaper article load with all images, then suddenly the text disappear and only come back 2 minutes later and with some funky unreadable font.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#88

Post by jalfresi »

ThomPete wrote: post #7

It’s true that many designers tend to look at text more like a texture. 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. It's an unfortunate consequence of so much design today going minimal and more typographic, which makes it's hard to differentiate elements any other way than to start evening out the contrast. If everything t…

"If everything that is text was just black you would loose the hierarchy"

Nonsense. Type weights exist for this, as does size, grouping, placement etc.

Typography IS hierarchy.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#89

Post by r3bl »

StreamBright wrote: post #47

I regurarly copy paste URLs into Pocket to be able to read the content, not even for storing it long term. Pocket became the ultimate readability vendor for me over the last year, for those reasons the author listed in his post and for some other reasons (like advertising for example) too.

Same thing here, but mostly because I tweaked Pocket's CSS to fit my needs (font, font size, colors, and article width IIRC). Now I feel as comfortable as I can be while reading from it.

Going back to adjusting to a different style for the every single article I read is just not an option. Sure, I can do it if the article is short, but if it's >1000 words, I'm reading it in Pocket.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#90

Post by flyinghamster »

unicornporn wrote: post #38

I'm so surprised that all attempts at solutions for "readability" so far seems to have addressed the actual article or post content only. I don't just want to read a sane looking web, I want to browse a accessible and sane looking web. I'd like to be able to activate a browser mode that cleans up not only the content of the site, but also the structure by creating simple and accessible navigation (perhaps according t…

Reader Mode in Firefox is a pretty good start at this. It's especially nice on overly-designed news sites.
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