Ironically, a great illustration of why pictures are trash for explaining concepts outside of specific scenarios. What exactly is the picture trying to convey? How much time and how many bits did the picture take compared to the text?
Thankfully, my eyesight works. But I’m sick and tired of designers pretending I’m illiterate and replacing text labels with inscruitable icons and graphics. Hey, remember when you could change your preferences by going to “File -> Preferences?” Instead of hunting around the interface looking for an unlabeled gear icon or hamburger icon or whatever some designer thinks conveys the same concept?
My guess is being utterly lazy with localization. They don't want to have some sort of font rendering or anything like that with fixed dimensions or having and then it got cargo-culted from there. Personally I find searchable text far more useful as Ctrl + F "Setting" highlights everything so much quicker especially on large pages.
I also loathe the unnecessary javascript everywhere.
When attempting to open the website I was greeted with:
uMatrix has prevented the following page from loading:
https://blog.logrocket.com/the-easiest-way-to-keep-your-web-apps-accessible-c2b57506cc2a
I never blacklisted the website on uMatrix[0] myself so I checked the list of hosts files I'm using. It's apparently part of Peter Lowe’s Ad and Tracking Server List[1]
[0] Obligatory "How do you know someone uses uMatrix? They'll tell you"-joke. I know, I know... mea culpa
Blog content seems to load with Javascript disabled in Chrome, with the only thing missing being the Clap, bookmark, share icons that follow the side of the article and the account menu drop down.
For some reason, font sizes have shot through the roof in the past few years. Medium is one of the biggest offenders. You get maybe 2-3 paragraphs per page now, when entire articles would fit on a single screen page with normal-sized fonts.
I'm in favor of this. My eyes aren't particularly bad, but I have to use reading glasses in order to read most computer text, and some can get really difficult. Larger fonts are better even for my bad-like-most-other-people-my-age eyes. The tiny text I would have found fine 20 years ago is painful now.
There's an easy fix for folks like yourself: most (all?) modern browsers support setting a minimum font size. Jack that up way into the double digits, and stop justifying ridiculously large font sizes for everyone.
> That would be a much better plan. See what I mean?
No, because there are cases where having large fonts makes sense (e.g. <h1> for article titles, etc) while preserving the ability to display smaller fonts than that (e.g. for article content).
Conversely, you could just ctrl-shift-plus and make the text as readable as you like, since it bothers you and stop justifying the rest of us having to jump through hoops.
Who should have to jump through hoops, the person who cannot read text that is too small, or the person who's sensibilities are offended by text that is too large?
Most operating systems have accessibility options to help with that. Consider helping your mother to use those, they exist for a reason. Punishing everyone just because a few folks need help is not the answer.
But flip the logic. Your inaccessible site, due to tiny unreadable fonts, is punishing everyone whose eyes aren't as good as yours, which is a lot of people.
Or just stick to the basic logic: you can increase tiny fonts, where as on most sites now I can't shrink them. So it is punishing.
Your mother is inconvenienced, we are punished. She only has to adjust one setting, where as I get no option.
And nobody is talking about tiny unreadable fonts, we're talking normal verses gigantic. If she can't read the normal OS font size, shes the problem and not the rest of us.
Yep. That's also how we got oceans of empty, wasted space on each side, necessitating scrolling.
Skimming? Since when does a literate person skim? Just read it, you lazy so-and-so, like you just read a book! A book with gigantic margins, like all books ever!
This is compensating for the fact that font sizes dropped through the floor for years. I recall being told years ago that 16pt font was the desire, but actually most sites were using a LOT of 12 pt (or equivalently close). I even recall reading that, actually, 16pt is not necessarily large enough for easy comprehension of the average reader.
In the past decade designers/PMs have started to figure out that users don't read, so they aren't trying to wedge as much text in. Though I'm no fan of some iOS interface, I credit Apple with getting the concept of legible text into mainstream design thought.
As far as Medium et al goes - I think the idea there is not so much the font size as not wanting to show you more than 2-3 paragraphs, lest you get a "wall of text" opinion and not read any of it.
This is why I disable custom fonts and limit the range in size from 9-13 everywhere. I have a mono and a regular font allowed. I've been doing that for at least a decade.
People use Medium because it's the easiest way to write some plain text and have what you wrote look decent in the browser. That's all it comes down to.
That's not plain text, it's HTML. It's a total fiddle to write by hand (lots of angle brackets), and as you say you then have to find somewhere to host it.
But it also doesn't look as good as Medium. If browser makers were willing to be progressive and act as user agents, like they were originally intended to, then the two would look very similar. Unfortunately web browser text sizes haven't kept up with increasing screen density and so we have point-size inflation instead; the complete lack of margin also makes for a struggle when reading (though I do think Medium has gone too far in the other direction lately). Medium's link styling is less obtrusive; conversely code blocks on motherfuckingwebsite-style sites aren't visible enough. Image sizing on motherfuckingwebsite-like sites is also all wrong (they're sized to pixels rather than to anything meaningful). A lot of sites look worse than motherfuckingwebsite, but Medium is an improvement IMO.
I've always found Medium to only become readable once I use Firefox's reader mode. The interstitial, the aggravating headers and often footers, the utterly useless sidebar icons.
Their styling is unobtrusive, but the result is something that leaves me thinking a designer needs to be shot for working far too hard to justify their pay.
Pretty much. Writing markdown with jekyll is too technical or not WYSIWYG enough for most people who don't want to touch a command line, and running your own ghost/wp/etc blog is too much for the average person to do without using ghost.org or another pay-per-month hosting service.
