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0 pointsashton3143y ago0 comments

I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it. As it stands, I think the new design is a much better default for most people.

Also, zooming and changing browser window size is, while only a keystroke away, isn’t something I want to do just to make a site that should be optimized for reading text more legible. It should just default to that way.

In short, I’m sorry this doesn’t fit your flow. That’s frustrating. But I think this is a better design. Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography seems to support this view. [1] (MB is a lawyer, typographer, and Racket programmer for those not familiar with his work.)

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/page-margins.html#on-the-web

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lmm3y ago

> I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it.

How? Seriously, if you have a way to do this that works for pages in general I'll be extremely grateful. I tried using a user stylesheet that said * { max-width: 100% !important } for a while, but that breaks too many non-root elements on all sorts of sites.

Whereas making the page narrow when it doesn't set a max-width seems very easy to do with a custom stylesheet.

spiralx3y ago

I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a new style and open the editor in a new tab and then add your CSS and hit save. You can also search for existing styles for your current website that have been published online.

You can have one style apply to multiple domains, I have a simple one for making text black and setting the font size and line spacing which works on a dozen sites or so. You can even use SCSS or Stylus instead of plain CSS if you want.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

lmm3y ago

> I use the Stylus extension for Chrome (also available on Firefox) to write user styles for sites, mostly to improve the legibility of text, but for sites like HN and Reddit that I browse a lot I've customised their look and feel extensively to match my tastes. Creating a custom style for a site just requires you to click the Stylus button in the toolbar, click on the site name at the bottom of the menu to create a new style and open the editor in a new tab and then add your CSS and hit save.

Yes, I'm talking about that kind of thing. It's trivial for people who want narrow sites to put a max-width on the root element that way. As someone who wants wide sites, how do I do undo all these designers' narrow widths without having to figure out manually what each individual site has done?

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ashton314OP3y ago

I don't do this personally, so I'm fuzzy on the details. I know of no way to make this work in general (how would you do that?) across sites, but Wikipedia pages follow a consistent format, so that shouldn't be too hard. Furthermore, someone[1] here on HN showed how you can control how the theme works.

My point: if you care that deeply about how Wikipedia in particular is laid out, you likely have the tools to force it to work that way. Meanwhile, the rest of us plebs get a better (from a typographical standpoint, not necessarily a case-by-case basis) default.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431533

mch823y ago

If you create an account on Wikipedia then you can go into preferences and define custom CSS styles.

trynewideas3y ago

Not all uses of Wikipedia are the types of reading supported by works and research in long-form reading. Hell, many, many Wikipedia articles aren't long-form, and paragraph text is a minority of content on some table-heavy articles.

The issue isn't with width but a lack of user preferences, logged in and not. You don't need user accounts, cookies, persistence, or frankly even Javascript to change the content width on an article. The skin designer can set the best practice for a contrived ideal use case as the default, and still let anyone with other use cases expand the content's max-width to fill more space.

EDIT: Looks like they added one — there's now a "Toggle limited content width" button now appearing for me in the bottom-right corner of the wider desktop views.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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lmm3y ago

> I think if you really want full-width text, you could write a little custom CSS to make it work how you want it.

Whereas making the page narrow when it doesn't set a max-width seems very easy to do with a custom stylesheet.

spiralx3y ago

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

lmm3y ago

1 more reply

ashton314OP3y ago

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34431533

mch823y ago

If you create an account on Wikipedia then you can go into preferences and define custom CSS styles.

trynewideas3y ago

EDIT: Looks like they added one — there's now a "Toggle limited content width" button now appearing for me in the bottom-right corner of the wider desktop views.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse