Yeah, and this website does grotty hacks to figure out my browser tab size and scale--which makes me scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll on a 4K monitor.<p>He's an brilliant idea: quit trying to turn the web from scrolling text into a damn slideshow. Thanks.
Auxiliary support provided by The Horde of Users Who Want Drop Shadow & Gradient Easements In Their UI So They Can Tell What They Can Click On, or THUWWDSGEITUISTCTWTCC, pronounced Thuh-Woods-Gheit-Eww-Tict-Wit-See.
The critique of HN seems off-base. The low-contrast comments are the ones that are downvoted and therefore the low-contrast is there <i>specifically</i> to make them less readable because they ostensibly deserve less attention.
I got a radical idea: do not touch the body text/background colors and let user agent/browser pick the colors according to users preferences.
Many of the examples looked borderline to me. How much contrast is 'enough'?<p>Also - surely this is something that should be fixable in the OS or browser? OSX has an high-contrast accessibility mode. Do we really need to fix this at source?
Discussion from last time around:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047</a>
Despite praising high contrast, this site hypocritically throws away contrast for no good reason. I can understand using non-white backgrounds, because it can reduce glare, but using grey text is pure fashion. This site uses color:#191919 text. As always, the only good solution is user CSS to set it to #000000. I use the Stylish addon for Firefox to let me toggle this quickly for sites with light or dark color schemes.
The following is a brain dump of an idea I have:<p>I've thought of writing a proxy server that parses pages before serving them to you. It's goal would be to make webpages more readable, with sane font sizes and colors. I'm tired of reading webpages on my iPhone that are "optimized" for mobile where each line is 5 words. I could fit more text on the screen of my first laptop, which had half the resolution. Also, blog posts from medium.com currently crash mobile Safari.<p>Every website would require custom code. It's default failure mode would be to just show the original web page. I don't want to have to fuck with it when some page gets mangled and is completely unreadable.
I am confident this rebellion will be one of the few that will succeed in these days.<p>Why ? Because rebellions like revolutions need a critic mass of people and well, we are getting very old here ;-)
They may have gotten the contrast thing right but they totally messed up on the fonts. I rarely comment on style because I think the substance is what we should focus on but for a site that goes out of its way to criticize one particular design parameter I don't get how they could mess up so badly on another. That's just ugly.
Not sure about the aesthetics argument. Form follows function - if it functions well it looks good, and vice versa. (What people sometimes miss is that you aren't born with a sense of aesthetics/taste but it needs to be learned and the above rule is a good way of improving your understanding of what looks good.)
Services like <a href="https://readability.com/" rel="nofollow">https://readability.com/</a> certainly help. To the extreme, let's have the equivalent of Photoshop's 'curves' filter - map everything to either absolute black or absolute white.
dark background, Light Background!, dark background, Light Background!<p>Scrolling trough this page made my eyes hurt, did nobody test the transitions when they set really dark and light backgrounds right after each other?
Web design was perfected in 1454 when Gutenberg typeset his Bibles with dark black text on light colored paper (also: with narrow, full-justified columns). Deviation from that is abusive to your readers and an affront to common decency.
Well, what I'm to say here… If you are site owner and you feel that colors hurt conversion/number of visitors/time spent on page/whatever else you care about — you probably should change the colors. If you are a visitor and you feel that colors of the site you'd like to use discourage you to do so — you probably need to help yourself and make a custom CSS of your own (using Stylish or something) to satisfy your very unique needs or just use one of many services like <a href="http://readable.tastefulwords.com/" rel="nofollow">http://readable.tastefulwords.com/</a> .<p>Anything else: rebel all you want, nobody fucking cares.<p>My personal humble opinion, btw: the "unreadable" examples are much more readable and easier on the eyes, than eye-burning "readable" ones. So I could as well go around rebelling about white on black or black on white, but I won't, because it's stupid, I follow my own advices and use Pocketbook for long reads anyway.