[dgallagher]

Curious; what type of display were you reading on? How big is it? What was its resolution?

--------------------

Reading it on a 27" 2560x1440 display was really nice. Same in vertical mode on a 9.7" iPad, but not so good in horizontal mode; it felt constricted like watching a letter-boxed 16:9 movie on a 19" 4:3 TV screen.

What I've found is that optimal text formatting varies greatly across devices. This is very hard to design for due to the variety of screens. From small screen devices like cell phones and gray-scale Kindle's, through larger 24" - 30" monitors and even larger HDTV's. On top of that there are DPI variances.

I've always been a fan of MVC, separating the model (actual document data/text/pictures) from the view (how it's displayed), and using a controller (device/screen-specific code) to display things optimally.

It would be nice if there was a standard that existed allowing authors to simply write documents, saving them as models. Then, each device could read from a standard model file and, using custom controller code, generate a view displaying the text/images optimized for its display.

Right now you see web developers creating multiple CSS layouts for different screen layouts. This works for most cases, but not edge scenarios. It feels very hacky, and I can't foresee people building websites/content-delivery-mechanisms like this 10 years into the future. There must be a better way.

[thaumasiotes]

> It would be nice if there was a standard that existed allowing authors to simply write documents, saving them as models. Then, each device could read from a standard model file and, using custom controller code, generate a view displaying the text/images optimized for its display.

This standard is called "HTML". What you describe is the entire idea of HTML. Frankly, it's embarrassing that a web browser presented with a long stream of text won't keep the line lengths capped at a reasonable length.

[uglycoyote]

Yes, this is why it drives me crazy that Safari on iOS does not wrap text as you zoom in. Every browser since the beginning of time has been able to properly wrap the text as you increase the text size, and Apple has totally broken that.

[kalleboo]

That was one of my biggest complaints about iOS coming from Android. Reading Hacker News comments on iOS is a horrible experience of swiping back and forth, back and forth.

[Joeri]

What's worse is that the other browsers decided to emulate this bad behavior. Most of the mobile browsers now no longer properly wrap text when zooming, where once they did.

[dgallagher]

I guess you could say that HTML meets that standard. For example, <h1> through <h6> headers could be rendered by the browser accordingly; most default renderers still display things mostly the same way Netscape Navigator 2.0 did back in the Win 3.1 days (disable CSS on a site and you'll see).

Marked on the Mac, which is a Markdown renderer, loads .mmd files and renders them against a CSS template which you can swap out. That fits the MVC idiom nicely, although far from a perfect implementation as it's merely meant for viewing markdown files, not everything on the internet.

[Greed]

I also have a 27" 2560x1440 display, and I found this really difficult to read. The fonts are far, far too large and I kept feeling a bit overwhelmed at any distance. It was an actual effort of will to continue reading it until I lowered the page size to 75%. Viewed from around 2'1" distance as well.

[MaulingMonkey]

> Curious; what type of display were you reading on? How big is it? What was its resolution? > Reading it on a 27" 2560x1440 display was really nice.

Same reaction as OP, same monitor dimensions (both resolution and physical size) as you. Head to screen distance is probably around 2 feet?

[dgallagher]

Bingo @ 2ft.

[kyberias]

17" 1280x1024, viewing distance about 50 cm. When I'm reading a book, the text size is much smaller than on this page. Mostly like HN pages really.

[oneeyedpigeon]

The font size on HN is about the same as in a book when the book is held right up against my screen (my screen is almost exactly arm's length). When I hold a book up to my face, at my normal reading distance, the text size is much bigger than HN's and - roughly - the same as the OP.

[kyberias]

Do you read childrens' books? :) Well, you are correct, but again it depends on the size of the font on the book, right? Normal book or magazine text seems to be slightly larger than HN test on screen when viewed on "normal" reading distance.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Well, of course, but the book I was referring to was a UK Penguin fiction paperback - pretty much as 'standard' as it gets, although I don't know about international variations.