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.
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.