Medium is a poor choice for blogging

Re:Medium is a poor choice for blogging by petetnt on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @10:53AM (#18441864)

On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Lynx, adjust the styles myself or use a CRT display, but I most likely won't bother.

That said I am not defending current state of Medium.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/VXestU1.png

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Re:Medium is a poor choice for blogging by zeveb on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @11:58AM (#18442508)

> On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone.

Just resize your browser window: it's not the site's job to guess how you want content displayed.

I loved browsing the web in the 90s: I had a half-width browser window on one side of my screen, an editor window in the upper quadrant of the other side and a console window the the lower quadrant. It was great! Then suddenly every website decided that I must have a full-width browser window, and was ludicrously narrow with a half-width browser. And they all stopped using and started abusing CSS. And then they all started using & abusing (but I repeat myself) JavaScript.

All I really want from the Web in 2018 is the experience I had in the 90s, and I can't get it any longer.

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Re:Medium is a poor choice for blogging by athenot on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @11:23AM (#18442138)

Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Usually it will also scale the images in sensible ways. And it's available via keyboard shortcuts, so it's easy to zoom in/out.

Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.

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Re:Medium is a poor choice for blogging by Tallain on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @12:01PM (#18442538)

Here's the thing: It's not better zoomed in. Insanely huge lettering isn't any better just because it's suddenly 85 characters wide on your screen, or whatever the goal these days is.

At a certain point you have to recognize that even little CSS (max-width, font-size) can actually be a good thing, and when a site lacks this it doesn't make it somehow inherently better, it just makes it harder to read and I am nearly as inclined to simply hit the back button as I am on Medium articles. It's two ends to a horseshoe. The best place to be is somewhere closer to the middle.

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Re:Medium is a poor choice for blogging by PavlovsCat on Tuesday November 13, 2018 @11:59AM (#18442515)

> Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size.

Here's the thing: I don't want the font or the images to be bigger, I want columns to not be this absurdly long. The only way for the user to achieve it is to resize the browser window.

There is a "max-width" CSS property for that. No framework or JS required, just a modicum of care.

> Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.

It still would using max-width.

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