Post AzT6BSBhkm41inxftI by mray@social.tchncs.de
(DIR) More posts by mray@social.tchncs.de
(DIR) Post #AzT6BPdxDHsVpY9h0S by mray@social.tchncs.de
2025-10-22T09:13:31Z
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@jzb People living in the terminal may love it. Maybe that's great, as those are the people being catered to. To me it just says: "I do not want to be read. 90s websites were clearly peak readability. Any decent layout and design is nothing but glitter and eyecandy."I think the LWN approach is unnecessarily limiting its audience to a small subset.Assuming "modern" isn't user-friendly is like assuming vintage style necessarily looks like this:
(DIR) Post #AzT6BQwmMmWxsDyEzI by dentangle@chaos.social
2025-10-22T11:10:07Z
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@mray @jzb I look at a lot of different news sites most days, and LWN's is the most readable.Almost every other site has delays in loading content, cookie popups, and bright white backgrounds that hurt my eyes.Show me a modern website that loads as fast as LWN and is as readable.
(DIR) Post #AzT6BSBhkm41inxftI by mray@social.tchncs.de
2025-10-22T11:31:35Z
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@dentangle @jzb Loading speed and popups have no impact on readability.A simple example increasing LWNs readability? – LWN with line-height set to 1.5.
(DIR) Post #AzT6BTQz7RsfaU7OLY by abucci@buc.ci
2025-10-22T13:15:58Z
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@mray@social.tchncs.deLoading speed and popups have no impact on readability.Speaking as a low-vision person: this is ableist, and wrong. I'd urge you to rethink your position, because you seem to be conflating "readability" with something very specific that does not include how a lot of people actually read in practice. LWN is phenomenally good for a low vision reader like myself.I spend 99% of my time zoomed in to the portion of a web page that I need to read, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to read the page at all. Popups, especially those that move, subvert the possibility of doing this effectively much of the time.Load time does as well if the page re-arranges itself as more content becomes available, which many fancy sites do. If I'm zoomed into a small region to read it and then the page rearranges such that what I'm reading is now out of the zoomed region, my reading is interrupted.Both of these phenomena are so common that I have extensive uBlock Origin rulesets to prevent them, and I've entirely stopped using sites where I cannot effectively prevent these behaviors.Reading mode, which several browsers offer, seems like it might help, but it's unreliable. Reading mode often omits multiple paragraphs without any obvious clue that this has happened.@dentangle@chaos.social @jzb@hachyderm.io
(DIR) Post #AzT6BZEnXfhJaQSkBU by dentangle@chaos.social
2025-10-22T11:25:11Z
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@mray @jzb The LWN default CSS is okay, but when I log in I have it set to the old colours from 10 years ago, which are much kinder to my eyes and with the text wrapped at a more readable length.That's a really cool accessibility affordance that few sites have.
(DIR) Post #AzT7CVWmv8aWKAtCxU by dentangle@chaos.social
2025-10-22T13:20:21Z
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@abucci @mray @jzb One of the worst news sites for this is news.bbc.co.uk.The page loads. I scan the headlines and find something interesting.After about 1-2 seconds @BBCNews detects I'm outside the UK and reloads the page entirely, changes the colours, articles and layout. Then - flash - here's the cookie popup covering most of the readable page.I'm so disoriented by the whole thing I generally just close the site again. I rarely read the BBC for that reason.
(DIR) Post #AzT7CWxPbdTkl2Lz60 by abucci@buc.ci
2025-10-22T13:27:39Z
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@dentangle@chaos.social I suppose someone also thought it was clever to have floating widgets, like the video widgets news sites love, that follow a person's scroll, but for me this has the effect of almost completely obscuring the text of a page, making the page literally unreadable. This would seem to be the sort of thing people who claim to care about readability would care about.@mray@social.tchncs.de @jzb@hachyderm.io @BBCNews@flipboard.com
(DIR) Post #AzTLBcyH9xQATiDmCW by fnohe@ohai.social
2025-10-22T15:33:17Z
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@dentangleOne of the best news sites in this respect: https://lite.cnn.com/ It's almost as good as an RSS feed@abucci @mray @jzb @BBCNews
(DIR) Post #AzTLBeCUaaO4I5se00 by abucci@buc.ci
2025-10-22T16:04:14Z
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@fnohe@ohai.social Visually, that looks pretty simple, I agree. It's 300 kbytes, which is significantly smaller than a lot of web sites.However, 183 kbytes of that page is a style tag in the head. Another 94 kbytes are a script tag. The news articles are only 21 kbytes. That page could be roughly 21k, using 10x less bandwidth, besides having fewer security concerns etc.@dentangle@chaos.social @mray@social.tchncs.de @jzb@hachyderm.io @BBCNews@flipboard.com
(DIR) Post #AzTVEbK2kIXPm5SXU8 by fnohe@ohai.social
2025-10-22T17:30:20Z
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@abucciChallenge accepted, I found another one for you: https://text.npr.org/@dentangle @mray @jzb @BBCNews
(DIR) Post #AzTVEcMYsQ990Be436 by abucci@buc.ci
2025-10-22T17:56:55Z
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@fnohe@ohai.social 6k, not bad. I didn't take a deep look, but during a cursory glance all I saw was pretty innocuous-looking CSS. It's also quite usable in Lynx. I might have to keep this one!@dentangle@chaos.social @mray@social.tchncs.de @jzb@hachyderm.io @BBCNews@flipboard.com