Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ColinWright 2138 days ago
OK, so I'm going to be a grumpy old man ...

My eyesight isn't great, so I use the "Zoom" function on Firefox to increase the font size. But the text now doesn't wrap, and I'm constantly scrolling from side-to-side to be able to read the text. It's tedious in the extreme.

Screen shot here: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/daScript.png

Magnification, line truncation, and scroll bar indicated.

* Why doesn't the text wrap to the window size? No idea.

* Why is it written like this? No idea.

Annoying, irritating, and so unnecessary.

3 comments

> I'm going to be a grumpy old man ...

Ironically, the site is made using tables for layout! Like, the really old technique where the left and right margins of the content are actually td's with a bunch of &nbsp's inside.

I'm really surprised that someone would make a site this way nowadays. It is a lot more work than necessary and the end results are not great (as you can see here).

PS: Running this in your console will get to a mostly workable state (not great, but better):

[...document.querySelectorAll('*')].map(e => {e.style.width = 'auto';})

Edit: I did my good deed of the day by opening a PR that modernizes the site's markup and CSS, fixing the issues too:

https://github.com/GaijinEntertainment/daScript/pull/70

Thank you for that contribution!

Updated site is now live (along with big documentation update and link to sandbox tio.run).

Maybe that's why it loaded so fast it was done before I could switch to the tab.
Yup, and Reader mode on Firefox Mobile is disabled. Couldn't read more than a few sentences.

Just out of curiosity, what controls whether or not reader mode is enabled?

I believe it is a heuristic that looks at text length, element type and class name.
Yup! It looks for paragraphs that are at least 140 characters long. I wrote about it a bit more here: https://videoinu.com/blog/firefox-reader-view-heuristics
Even worse on mobile