I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read:
the font size isn't ideal, but I find the line width to be a far larger problem.
a traditional book will have around 70 characters per line [1]. by contrast, on my screen (13" M1 macbook air at default screen resolution and browser zoom), suggestion 5 has 231 (!!) characters on its first line.
Yes and the doctype is "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">", and there's inline style at "<body bgcolor=white>". Even though the footer says "last updated 2021" and there are links dated 2015, I suspect the page is otherwise unchanged from its initial late-90s/early 2000s design.
Hmm. IE 5.0 and IE 5.5 were released in 1999, so perhaps the first version was written then. I also see a citation from 2015, which is a strong signal this was edited in or after 2015.
HN uses a font size of 14px, that's only slightly smaller than most browser's baseline of 16px (Vs. 12px for small). By any chance are you reading it on a 4K display?
In my opinion, HN and most websites, shouldn't be setting a baseline font size at all (least of all in pixels). Medium/default should be the baseline then large/larger etc should be used as-needed.
it's smaller than most other websites and for me on a 1080p display top level comments don't wrap until ~200 characters at the default zoom level which makes it even worse
edit: also for me the font size is set to 12, not 14
I have grown to like it. I found it really perplexing like you but now I view it as they just want to present their information in the rawest, most simple way possible. I was been inspired by it when I made my personal website, however I added some responsiveness etc to increase the usability a bit.
