The 1980s theme was the only one I could stand, and the 1990s theme appears to be the same as the Tropical Days theme. All the ones with the background are essentially unusable for me.
It's their site, they can do whatever they want, but it's a bit silly to act like there's something wrong with anyone who has a problem with it. For example, in the default theme the yellow text (#FFFF00) with the pink highlight (#FF00FF) fails WCAG contrast requirements across the board.
Maybe the really don't care whether everyone has an easy time reading their site or not, and that's their choice, but I find the snark about it off-putting. It's not difficult to design a site that's easy for everyone to read.
> But anyway, most of the material published on our research website is also available in gemtext format via our gemini server.
Might be the only way I'd read this site.
Same. I think this is one of those things where they were having some fun, and then some people on the Internet overreacted with great hyperbole, and so they're issuing this response to those people, but I'm sitting here reading it and it feels aggressive, and I think, "Wait, what did I do? I'm just sitting here not bothering anybody", and it begins to feel like a low-level conflict. I think a lot of internet discourse is like that, unfortunately.
Of course, with such an obviously high skill at design implementation, they did plenty enough to be perfectly fine for most use-cases, so it's hard to be too hard on them about any of their choices. Everything works just fine. And to ignore complaints that ignore your design choices is a fine disposition, as well! No reason to bother with people who aren't interested in your vision and don't contribute.
But to snark about the complaints, as if there's nothing you could do better? Smacks of an aloofness that is an off-putting characteristic for an organizations purporting to do research.
Looks like we need to "seek professional medical advice"
Some sites have it in the address bar, but I've never found any documentation from MS that makes it clear how to ensure that it is always there.
It's so easy to make a site that is accessible - a blank HTML document with no CSS essentially is. It takes work to make a site that isn't.
>>Arghhhh! Your pages give me a headache, and/or eyestrain.
>Stop using the site immediately and consult a qualified ophthalmologist. Seriously, no static display on a modern and correctly adjusted VDU such as a computer monitor or phone screen should ever be inducing headaches or eyestrain in a healthy individual when properly used for reasonable time periods, and with sufficient breaks. If it is, you may have an underlying health condition which has otherwise gone un-noticed.
this statement basically implies that you have no intention of creating a website that is accessible to all users, and to all of those users with cognitive, vision, or neurological issues: "tough luck, go see a doctor!". Though I understand the goal here in terms of style and this page is indeed WCAG friendly enough in terms of some of the most obvious success criteria- this website is an objective nightmare for those with a variety of cognitive disabilities.
Yet another reminder of the overblown nature of UX/UI in general. Given the current push for accessibility, seems like "make the text accessible" should be the goal above all else.
They do provide reasonable contrasts for all text on the page.
The text is a reasonable size.
Which is honestly better than most websites, especially technology sites.
That said, it would be nice if they supported readers though, or directly linked to their "gem text" (pure ascii) site. Putting blame on the browsers for the site's design choices is lazy.
There's a different kind of incapacity involved: incapacity to control your device and software to have them suit your needs. The reply assumes that user has no other option except to drool and stare at what website author chose.
unlike with the blind or low vision population, those with cognitive and neuro issues often aren't aware of assistive tech, often aren't familiar with the accessibility settings on their devices, and sometimes aren't even aware of the disability they are dealing with and are undiagnosed.
spotify, steam, epic and many more.
big diff between profit/trend driven design and philosophical/practical design.
font-size: min(max(1em, 1.3vw), 1.3em);
This is going to be the default font-size for all of my websites now (preceded by a fallback for maximum compatibility of course).
That's what the outer min() is for: it makes sure the font size caps out at 1.3em which usually translates to 16 x 1.3 = 20.8px, which is well within the recommended size range for prose anyway.
What that whole snippet does boils down to exactly what they said in the article:
> The main global stylesheet uses the browser default font size, smoothly scaled up to 130% on higher-resolution displays as the baseline for the body text of the whole document.
On a low-dpi screen, nothing changes. On a high-dpi one, if you haven't set your browser text size to something larger, this snippet saves you from tiny unreadable text. Also note that ctrl+ and ctrl- to zoom still work just fine. It's not as dramatic a change as the sibling comment said. You can try it out on their site to see for yourself.
font-size: clamp(1em, 1.3vw, 1.3em);
I learned this from https://adrianroselli.com/2019/12/responsive-type-and-zoom.h...
Thanks for the tip on clamp() by the way, TIL.
This is a good write up of using clamp and fluid type
I'm certainly glad they like what they've built. But it breaks a lot of design concepts that help with UX (some in micro ways that aren't really noticeable without the aggregate effect). The "max character width" is a really valuable thing for "readability". But why bother with learning design when you're using all of the TECHNICAL specs 'exactly as specified'. Why bother with design responsibility when you're already absolving yourself of technical responsibility ('it should not be our job to work around bad tech...').
Of course, the most galling thing is that they're not actually using the spec, as it is specified. Using `section` tags everywhere is inappropriate. They are meant to break up content in the `article` tag.
But, okay, whatever; you're going to cling to the spec but still ignore the parts of it you don't like. Fine. Like they said, it's not causing screen-reader issues, so who cares, right? Except that they ALSO don't use the `header` tag within those sections to denote what is clearly a header. Not a "heading" (h1-6, used for breaking up paragraphs in articles), maybe, since it's not in an article and that can cause funky screen-reader performance, but there's no reason to NOT use a `header` tag. This use case is literally what it was made for; giving a generic header that you can style and make accessible on your own. So why use a `section` tag erroneously, but then eschew using the `header` tag for the exact purpose you need? (why use it? screen readers/accessibility)
Nothing in this seems like "well-considered design". Rather it seems like "good enough, and how I like it." Which is a perfectly wonderful way to design and run a website! It's just kind of shitty to then go write an entire article telling anyone who misunderstands your uniqueness for a different flavor of uniqueness that you are actually doing everything exactly right and that anyone who dislikes your site should take their "problems" elsewhere. A fine enough attitude, if you're in to that kind of gatekeeping, but I've never found it compelling or endearing.
"Am I so out of touch?
No. It's the children who are wrong."
-Seymour Skinner, "The Simpsons"
- On chromium cpu usage do not evolve but it is not animating the favicon.
If you want to disable it on firefox and are using ublock origin, you can do so by going to the ublock origin dashboard --> My Filters and add the following line:
||research.exoticsilicon.com/images/icon.svg
It’s kind of how so many LaTeX documents look the same because nobody bothers to design anything; the inverse problem from Word where things are too easy to change.
Another one is here: https://www.vistaserv.net/
The font rendering is especially impressive to me. You can read more about it here: https://www.vistaserv.net/blog/90s-fonts-modern-browsers
I wish we could go back to a WWW where the browser was the user agent and the user was the authority on text size, font face, colors and so on. Browsers have devolved from applications allowing users to browse hyperTEXT into these free-for-all canvases for web designers’ creativity.
Technically this should be solvable by using the browser’s “no styles” feature, but many web sites seem to be careless with the structure of their HTML such that “no styles” isn’t even readable.
I know this ship has sailed and my opinion is a fart in the wind at this point, but the web could have turned into a nice, fast, consistent way to publish structured and linked TEXT, but instead we got this “Remote Photoshop for Web Designers.”
This is still the case.
Your browser allows you to choose which font and size you want to use, as well as editing the css loaded on a tab and most browsers have extensions available to automatically load the css of your choice for a particular site.
The fact is that you choose not to use that freedom.
Here's the aspects that I personally enjoyed:
- Tropical nights: this feels like a pleasant theme on the eyes, almost like an IDE dark mode
- Nitrate memories: another theme that feels fairly readable, with the contrast being okay in *most* places
- Light pastels: this one dials down the colors a little bit so they're not as distracting
I'd probably just have a chuckle about the quirky design and go browse other sites that might have the information that I'm looking for, due to my eyes scanning them more quickly and easily, much like you'd look at data in a spreadsheet (sans annoying pop-ups and other dark patterns that web is plagued with). But you know what? Their website design is none of my business, it's fine for them to make their own choices and run it how they desire, even if some of the answers on this particular page are a bit on the nose.
Can't say whether we'd benefit from more or less of that, in general, though.
My first webshack internship had a nice website with like 20+ very slick early web designs folks could switch between. So cool.
There's the Css Zen Garden, a set of html elements to practice your design chops on. That was so the spirit of web design, highlighted so powerfully how bodaciously rad having html structured information & css styling as separate entities was, rather than as almost all UI toolkit do having the two concerns more intermingled. Zen Garden Forever. https://www.csszengarden.com/
The site's design is not to my taste -- but I seriously love that it doesn't look like almost all of the rest of the web.
Most of the web all looks the same. I applaud Exotic Silicon for pushing back against that.
However inventing something new is really difficult especially after the space of the ideas had been explored for a long time.
As for fashion, once you exhausted all the variations of the current fad you have to start again with an old one, with a twist. The result is that all those new web sites look old to me.
Exoticsilicon looks really old.
…well, almost every. Exotic Silicon is still at large, last seen in the vicinity of the 46 block.
Not a niche or hobbyist website, but a genuine car leasing company. Who's owner deliberately styled the site like this to act as a differentiator in a crowded market. It's certainly unique, I'll give them that.
Sometimes marketing is so bad it’s good
https://research.exoticsilicon.com/terms
First I’ve seen that.
Our brains are artificial intelligence? Humans are machine learning?
I mean, c'mon. If humans are artificial, then what do you call real? If humans are machines, then what on earth isn't?
No, they could not. Even if they did, those things are just different. It won't change what AI/ML is, a bunch of bytes in memory and on a disk. Just making a bunch of reaching comparisons, won't absolve AI/ML of responsibility.
I have no idea who "exoticsilicon" are or if they read HN but if they do, free-for-life rsync.net accounts for any of them that care to contact us.
I am already making good use of this particular piece of content:
https://research.exoticsilicon.com/articles/lte_ethernet_bri...
And yes, I realize I just upset many sensibilities here.
Having a large window should be telling the site "you have this space, make the best of it". Maybe it would be nice to have a built-in CSS property for "desired reading text width" but I think most people can pick a number and it is generally good for most readers.
For folks complaining of headaches or eye strain, browsers come equipped with forced-colors mode that enable you to choose your preferred color scheme.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Ooer/ best viewed on desktop
Enjoy it's luscious overdrive.
Have you tried that thing Bionic Reading it could be interesting for people to just digest the text further and quicker if that is the end goal but anyway its interesting I really do like it to be honest
Not everything needs to be hard and not everything needs to be dull.
nothing progressive about this design. just call yourself peculiar instead of giving this veneer of betterment
> Since admitting that you didn't realise the theme selector was there would make you look silly in front of people you don't even know
The theme selector is a link in the footer. It's probably the most subtle thing on the entire page. And it's not like they're using the rest of their real estate efficiently. I think it's fair to infer they prefer people don't realize they can change the theme until they've been annoyed.
The first prominent mention of themes is a heading six screenfulls down that mocks you for not changing it. It doesn't tell you how to change it.
This site is an explosion of emphasis. They can use massive size and gradients and flashy colors to emphasize their mockery of me. If they choose not to use the same for their theme switcher link I think it's fair to infer they don't want to emphasize it.
People who complain about offbeat-but-still-readable web design are killjoys who indirectly contribute to the sterility of the modern internet.
However, it is not the most accessible of websites and I certainly wouldn’t want to have e.g. Wikipedia be designed like this (oof), but I don’t mind the occassional quirky rebellious web design adventure.
This is like saying, we want to make our site progressive, so we'll embed a bunch of things in a magic eye, and the people reading can do free-viewing for that steroscopic effect.
Nevermind the simple fact that roughly 10% of the global population is color blind and as a result will biologically never be able to see it if the colors are wrong.
I think they channel the feeling quite well
This 100% felt like more playful teasing. At the expense of those who refuse to have a good time, who can't roll with it, who let themselves be tattered by tiny things.
It just going on and on and on just keeps highlighting how in depth & considerate & thoughtful they really are & keeps bringing out the joke more, about how hilarious & fun it is & how great it is to have such an amusing conversation piece.
This page is their moment of glory, a secret shrine to how awesome they are. The hurf-burf "this isn't 90's web design!" being way over precise & technical about the matter was a hilarious example of them just being here to have fun & be smart about shit.
That page doesn't read to me as playful or fun, it reads to me as angry and bitter. Although I understand (now) that's not what they were going for, I can't make my brain read it any other way.
if i really feel i need the info and de-styling wont work, then i read the source.
if to no avail, i go elsewhere.
You mean I'm not the only one who does this?? I think I end up doing that on about 25% of the websites I hit.
So they’re saying that they’re aware that their website is inaccessible to some people with certain health conditions, and they don’t intend to do anything about it.
That’s like if a grocery store with a staircase at the front door put up a sign that says, “If you have trouble climbing these stairs, consult your doctor. No person with healthy legs should have trouble climbing these stairs. You may have a health condition.”
I mean, thanks for the advice, but you’re still excluding people.
It’s supposed to be fun. Many fun things “exclude” people. Sports for instance. Music. Painting. There might be accessible versions. There are also inaccessible ones that trade off artistic expression over other factors. The internet is a big place. There’s room for all of it.