inbtwn
@inbtwn

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.



mcc
@mcc

Today is the last day that Google Stadia exists, which means I no longer see it as a threat and don't have to reflexively boycott it. Also incidentally this means they have re-enabled "Worm Game", a Stadia-exclusive game the Stadia team used for testing. It looks like a very low quality 90s mac shareware game, incidentally the only kind of video game I like, and hearing from Google employees who ran it during Stadia internal betas it might actually be the only actually fun thing on the service. I am going to stream this in 15 minutes, at 4:30 EST. https://twitch.tv/mcc111

I may delete this post after the stream, but I plan to write up my experience.

EDIT: I didn't delete the post but here's the writeup