Comment by Dwedit

13 days ago

"View -> Page Style -> Basic Page Style" is required to read any of the text.

Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.

  • > Form should follow function, not the other way around.

    According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

    • > According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.

      It's a well-known design principle to not impede the intended function of things by giving them a form that distracts from it. Of course you can deviate from that, especially if you want to make a point of some sort.

      However, I presume they publish their writings so they will be read by others. Making this hard will reduce their audience.

      If they are making this trade-off willingly, good for them, I suppose. But maybe they're so smitten with the style that they do not realize how hard to read it is.

      There's also a point at which the form gets so bad that it starts to disrespect the audience. Again, that can be on purpose, but it might be unintentional.

      This being a personal blog, it's not unreasonable to expect that a main purpose of it is communication. I think it's warranted to draw attention to the fact that its design gets in the way of that goal, big time.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  • I wish there was a rule against rule lawyering. Those comments are way more annoying than gp. (queue recursive replies)

  • I'd like to add to my sibling comments that this blog's design is so atrocious for its readability that it deserves to be called out.

    In fact, I'd like for such a comment to be at the top here, so that I can decide to avoid following the link until I have read enough comments to determine whether it's worth it.

I don't have any issues with it but I've been computing since the 8 bit days which basically looked exactly like that :)