I miss windows having borders. Just dug up a registry hack (obscene that such a thing was needed) to force win10 to have window borders again, because I keep ending up in situations where I honestly couldn't tell where one ends and the other begins.
They spent decades researching and building interfaces with visual cues, and we spent decades tuning our reflexes to them. Then some whim of fashion decided that hiding all those cues was "smoother", and I want to choke someone.
your eye needs somewhere to rest
There is a big difference between newspaper columns and web whitespace. The former are more or less uniform and easily seen (I’ve also read newspapers with explicit delineation of separate articles, and it was even better experience). The latter is just chaotic blobs of whitespace, which doesn’t usually even delineate or makes your eyes rest, it makes them lost instead. You can’t see structure, because it is so blobby. Whitespace should only surround the elements which are much more dense and “thicker” than it. Otherwise it will blend into them dissolving any structure.
I think that also has to do with "more white space = more scrolling = more ads".
Reddit is a perfect example of this. When they "updated" their UI to the current one, they added a ton of extra white space which forced people to scroll longer, thus spending more time on the site and viewing more ads. They also use a ton of other dark patterns.
When applied to the web, maybe, yes. But then there are desktop apps, and entire operating systems, designed this way.
I think it has something to do with the phones after all. Everything is "mobile first" these days (to a ridiculous degree — there's a large grocery delivery service in my city that is ONLY available through a mobile app, so they lost me as a customer), so designers have much more experience with touchscreen UIs. Desktop anything feels like an afterthought oftentimes. It's just easier to take a mobile UI, blow it up to a computer screen, or put it into a window, optionally add a dual-pane layout, and call it a day.
That, and the fact how many designers regard the result of their work as a thing in itself, an art piece to be admired, instead of merely a coat of paint on a tool that just helps people get their f-ing stuff done more efficiently and then gets out of the way.
Even if it selects all the right elements, syntax highlighting doesn’t work which is an issue for me since a lot of the articles I read involve code.
These are issues with every reader mode I’ve tried – iOS Safari, iOS/desktop Firefox, desktop Chrome.
I wish there were a standard CSS media type that sites could implement, like `@media reader`, to help specify which elements should be included and to support things like syntax highlighting.
A very long read but this covers everything:
> How to Section Your HTML
https://css-tricks.com/how-to-section-your-html/
These are specifically important for accessibility users.
Another short read:
> HTML5 sectioning elements, headings, and document outlines
https://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201103/html5_sectioni...
And you can use Markup Validation Service to validate and get tips:
https://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input+with_options
Check out the excellent answer by Christian Kohlschütter on how readability works:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3652657/what-algorithm-d...
But... that's the opposite of what was asked for. Adding an extension adds more of the bad. A patch for Firefox reader mode would be better in my opinion since the web itself won't become better.
If you don't have an account you can add ?useskin=skinname to end of url to trigger different skins.
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin... and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin...
For anyone curious, MS has a useful summary of how this works here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/snap-your-window...
I never knew what windows called it before, so there was no way to get rid of it in settings.
The settings pages aren't that big. You could read through it all in 5 minutes. Did you look? I mean sometimes things are annoying and you just can't be bothered to dig around to find the thing that turns it off, but at least in this case, it's easy:
Settings > System > Multitasking > Snap windows
Out of curiosity, I just opened Windows 10 Settings. I see sixteen top level options. I opened the first one and it had 16 submenus, the first of which is two pages tall and has 8 additional settings links from it. Of course, Control Panel is also a place it could be hiding, and it's even bigger.
So, no. One does not simply click on every single thing in settings hoping to find the annoying thing that Windows is doing today that you don't have a name for.
Typing "Snap Window" into search narrows it down to three, which makes it possible to accomplish.
Thanks again to the GP for enabling that.
you don't have to read every last word... you are just trying to get a vague feel for what is in there.
takes 5 minutes, max.
https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki-start.html
(I built this mostly for myself, because I find it incredibly difficult to read text that has hyperlinks and images in the text)
In part this is because I feel inline links on wikipedia often lets you overestimate how well you comprehend a subject. It's as though the fact that there is a link over a word makes you think you could go check what that is, and therefore that you probably understand the word.
Actually looking up some term mid sentence is also probably not particularly helpful for understanding the text either.
I concede that this is a somewhat unusual decision, but I designed the pages for the singular purpose of reading and comprehending the article. Everything else is secondary. It's a bit of a design experiment, but I think it's worked out pretty well. I don't fall into skim-reading these articles like I must admit I often do with regular Wikipedia articles.
I was actually looking at the footnote links, and those do indeed seem to be missing entirely -- as well as the whole references section. Arguably that's more important than links to "definition" wiki pages, so it forms the basis for the knowledge (vs mostly just definitions).
If you want to look up sources it's better to use the live wikipedia at any rate, since it will be more up to date than this snapshot.
My mirror clocks in at 21 Gb. I'm self hosting so there's no real money cost besides the one-time investment in hardware. A really chap person could probably host this off a raspberry pi attached to something like a Corsair Voyager and serve multiple requests per second.
There's some technical trickiness in actually storing the files in a file system, since most filesystems don't deal well with having millions of files in the same folder. So I've had to build a four-tier directory structure based on the hash of the file name to be able to store the files. They're stored in a structure like 31/444/781/225/foobar.gz.
I did some experiments storing them as BLOBs in a database, but I couldn't get it to work.
The bandwidth usage is pretty inconsequential since most of my pages clock in at just a few kilobytes.
Have you considered images just take up full width?
Wikipedia is a pretty big website, and (like the rest of my web presence) I'm hosting the mirror on a single small consumer hardware server. I'm keeping all the wikipedia pages as compressed HTML, and if you look at the sources you'll see it's very bare bones, most pages are like 50 Kb, yet the total is still 21 Gb. I don't think I have the space or bandwidth for selfhosting all of wikipedia's images.
Part of this experiment is to illustrate just how ridiculously large page loads on a lot of pages. Even text-heavy ones like Wikipedia.
If you compare the HTML payload alone of these two renditions of largely the same text, it's a 50x difference. The full Wikipedia page load exceeds 1 Mb, mine isn't even 10 Kb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scamander
https://encyclopedia.marginalia.nu/wiki/Scamander
That's kinda ridiculous.
Have you attempted to convert them to plain text and serve those? Or is there no real savings there?
I'm not sure if this is a subtle reference,but one of the major competing skins for wikipedia is named timeless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=timeless (its often quite popular among people using phones who find the official mobile website frustrating)
To be honest, while this looks pretty, it’s really just Wikiwand 2.0.
I always found it weird and annoying how the table of contents in Wikipedia is a tiny thing jammed at the start. It's so darn awkward to use.
That being said, I want someone to do the opposite of what this does. Less chrome, less bytes over the wire, less predictive search, less "flatness?", less timely, more timeless.