[Waterluvian]

I want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now.

The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful.

It’s difficult to have a nice “classic web” page that runs on phones without a lot of care to use media queries. Not that that’s a deal breaker but it quickly departs from the “keep it simple” philosophy of these designs when you are effectively designing it twice.

[10000truths]

> The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful.

I see this complaint often, but I don’t get it. Zooming and panning are two dead simple gestures on any smartphone browser, no more difficult than scrolling. Out of all the annoyances I’ve encountered visiting a website on my smartphone, having to zoom or pan ranks near the bottom for me. Why is it such a nuisance for others?

[Waterluvian]

Requires more than my thumb. So now I have to alter my entire ergonomics of phone usage for a page.

Double tap can sometimes work.

The other issue is that now the website has two overflow axes. So I’m just kinda wandering a page in some way that wasn’t designed by the author. To each their own but it feels janky and uncomfortable to have to wander a page. Especially if the page was designed with a certain viewport size in mind. They’re not expecting this case.

[sicp-enjoyer]

Default HTML is already responsive. What are you adding to break it on mobile?

(Of course, really old HTML that uses table based layout has problems.)

[Waterluvian]

Nothing needs to be changed because it’s not a responsiveness problem. The font is tiny because the page was designed for a far wider screen than a phone. A little css could fix it: collapse the two columns of links into one when on a narrow screen.

[sicp-enjoyer]

Sure, that's how to fix the BRK site. But I was replying to your comment:

> I want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now.

If you start from unstyled HTML it works. My question is what are you adding in your development process of making simple websites that breaks it for phones?

[lvass]

I tried it on firefox's Ctrl+shift+m, 250x300 looks bad but at 600x500 it's great. What phones are smaller than this now?

[Waterluvian]

360x640 is kind of what you have to aim for for the typical modern phone.