chris-weed-piano

Chris Weed, Pianist

@chris-weed-piano

communist strong sad

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chris-weed-piano
@chris-weed-piano
DecayWTF
@DecayWTF
inbtwn
@inbtwn

hot take: this is actually a good thing

for two reasons.

  1. the table of contents always displays on screen when your browser window is wide enough so you can jump to each section without having to scroll all the way up, and
  2. for me, sentences are pretty dang hard to read when they're as wide as a typical widescreen display. i am happy that one of the biggest offenders of this trend (the old wikipedia layout circa 2011-early 2023) is now gone, so that people like me can have an easier time reading articles without having to use an obscure browser extension or CSS hacks to de-widen the page.

there are a lot of sites (mainly personal sites, i've noticed) that still do this, though: whether it be through malice or inexperience, i've had to squash down a bunch of sites' widths down from its maximum width of (whatever width the browser window is) to a readable one of about 600-900px. i'm not exactly sure why this is, but it's easier to read sentences when they're about the width you would see in a typical book. probably has something to do with eyestrain

if you're reading this and if you plan on making a website that people can visit on desktop: please, set the max-width of the content in your CSS. to probably something within that range i mentioned in the last paragraph. me (and hopefully other people, because i have seen Taran Van Hemert1 mention this problem once as well) will thank you.

oh, and setting the paragraph's line-height to be somewhere around 1.5-1.75 would be nice too, but i won't make you go too far in that regard

  1. former editor for Linus Tech Tips. i would link to the video he mentioned this in but i can't find it for the life of me

DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

If you're reading this please ignore everything this person wrote.

Well, don't actually but tailor the site design to your audience and if it's your site to what you like because I fucking hate the "narrow column of text with hell void of nothing using up screen real estate all around it" style; as much as I like most things about Cohost, I don't really love the layout here! I find it hard to read and extremely wasteful, makes me scroll when I shouldn't have to, etc. Different things work for different people and different sites.

And yeah I am fucking mad about wikipedia.

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in reply to @cass's post:

dimethylhydra
@dimethylhydra

having been part of the public feedback process for this from fairly early on, this redesign is so fucking annoying. aside from clearly having some specific shit they really wanted in mind from the start and not wanting to change it despite feedback, they also acknowledged that a lot of ppl wanted a dark mode and then just didnt do anything with it. if i can focus enough i might make a post about it but GOD was it frustrating to watch, especially as someone that relies on custom css to make the site comfortable to read.

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dimethylhydra
@dimethylhydra

probably goes without saying but as soon as they forced the change i switched back (the css i have doesnt cover all the useless blank space) but i feel bad for anyone thats stuck without an account bc working around this is even more annoying then

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in reply to @inbtwn's post:

TommyTorty10
@TommyTorty10

I throw my hat into the take flames. With the table of contents on the left, it will make digging through dense articles much easier. The max width is wonderful. I dont have to fiddle with the browser's zoom and resize the window. I can just read the article.

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in reply to @DecayWTF's post: