Interesting topic, and funny that I personally consider the text width and font size of danluu’s blog to be a “bug”. It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text columns (remember newspaper columns when they were printed on paper). This is why I always read this particular blog with Apple’s Reader mode, which renders the text using larger font and narrower width.

▲ nchmy 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed. It is unreadable without a Reader mode.

	▲	ansgri 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		also reader on ios interprets it wrong as it picks up the first heading as the article’s title, and that makes me think that it could skip some content as it’s prone to do, so back to poorly readable layout I go.

▲ watermelon0 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is no CSS configuration for text/font on the website, so it's using browser defaults.

Seems like reader mode is needed due to bad defaults.

▲ lelanthran a day ago | parent [-]

That's a cop out in this specific instance: he knows the defaults are a bug, he can change it with maybe 2x lines of CSS, but he is blind to the fact that it's a bug.

After all, he is complaining about the defaults in other software, but he is blind to the defaults he presents the user.

▲ lmm a day ago | parent [-]

There is no way to specify a good size in CSS - a size that looks good on current computers will be too big on old computers, and a size that looks good on old computers looks too small on current ones. Browsers and users are the ones who can fix this.

▲ Tepix 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I think your knowledge of CSS might be outdated. What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?

    body {
      max-width: 70ch; /* Limits the text column to a comfortable reading width */
      margin: 0 auto;  /* Centers the text column on large screens */
      padding: 1.5rem; /* Prevents text from touching the edges on small/mobile screens */
      line-height: 1.6; /* Gives the lines room to breathe */
    }

As for font size, you can use

    font-size: 1rem;

to respect the browser's default font size.

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lmm 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What's wrong with the following CSS snippet for example?

It doesn't achieve a reasonable readable font size which was presumably the goal. Your padding won't be the right size for all screens either. (And personally I hate excessive line height).

> respect the browser's default font size

The browser's defaults are also bad. But they shouldn't be. The browser is in a position to actually fix this; the webdev isn't.

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mrob 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>What's wrong with the following CSS snippet

The problem is you're imposing your own idiosyncratic preferences on strangers. Your "improvements" cost valuable screen space. I paid good money for my screen space and I don't appreciate designers unilaterally wasting it because they personally think it looks better. The decision of how much (if any) space to spend on padding should be made by the user.

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mixmastamyk 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Learn how to resize windows, multitasking, tiling, etc. I prefer to have one monitor in portrait but understand many don’t have or not able.

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mrob 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Useful things to know, but how do they undo a designer wasting my screen space? If you're going to tell me to learn something, it should be CSS. At least Firefox can still be configured to follow its traditional role as "user agent" and allow me to override the bad decisions of designers, by setting toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets and editing chrome/userContent.css . But it would be convenient if more people used the default CSS like danluu.com .

	▲	mixmastamyk 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not sure, as I don't have any wasted screen space, due to the techniques mentioned above. On really bad sites I try reader view first, View/Page Style/No Style (on Firefox) second, and if that doesn't work I close the tab. Pretty rare though.

▲ crabbone 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think this is intentional?

I use Firefox reader, but the same idea. I actually prefer it this way (except I don't like that the reader doesn't support Vi/Emacs navigation...)

For content that is just text, I prefer that the author keeps the styling to the minimum. It makes it easier to do it the way I want it client-side.

▲ chrisjj 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is well known that we can read faster with narrower text

Speak for yourself.

Font size is client setting, and there's where lies any bug.