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Since this article mention's Gwern's site several times: While I admire Gwern's work a lot, I often find his website is trying to do so much that my browser wi

Since this article mention's Gwern's site several times: While I admire Gwern's work a lot, I often find his website is trying to do so much that my browser will really struggle. Especially on mobile. It's bad enough I usually avoid reading there, which is a shame. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but it might be a combination of page length with many layers of nested, richly formatted and embedded content.

rednafi 2y ago
Ditto. I like Gwern's content but not much the presentation. The same goes for Simon Willison's site. I much prefer the brutalist look of Drew Devault, Fabien Sanglard, or Dan Luu's site.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  I don't mind Drew or Fabien's layout, which have a reasonable column width. But Dan's site is unreadable for me (at least on desktop) without reader mode. What would be the reason for choosing to have full-width text on a blog?
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    Dan's website is a great example of the pendulum swinging in the other direction to malicious non-conformism. Yes, UXers have made modern web design hell, but presenting a raw unstyled html isn't respecting your user much either.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    I think that is not so simple to solve. Limit it to some column width? Someone will complain that it only uses one third of their screen. Unlimited width? Someone will complain about whole width text. But the good thing is, that there is reader mode and evem if there wasn't, you could zoom in or resize the browser window or send to new window and resoze only that.
    - gnicholas 2y ago
      Yeah, most browsers do have reader mode now. I honestly don't love them because they're typically not customizable, and are sometimes too narrow for my taste. I wouldn't mind resizing the browser window except that with tabbed systems that means you're resizing all of the tabs at the same time. I tend to think that if you make the width something in the neighborhood of what the NYT, Medium, or other well-known sites use, people won't complain. But I could be wrong!
      - zelphirkalt 2y ago
        Firefox reader mode is a little bit customizable. Font size column width and so. Cumbersome, but one can change width of a single tab by using the inspector and using the responsive design mode. Perhaps there is room for another Firefox feature to limit width of a page. Perhaps multi-column mode, where one can for example split the page in 3 columns and each column displays, what could not be fit on the previous column. And resizable columns maybe.
  - account42 2y ago
    What would be the reason for choosing a browser width wider than what you can comfortably read?
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Huh: my browser is always maximized (the width of my monitor) as are all the other apps I regularly use -- similar to how an iPad worked before iPadOS introduced multitasking -- but then I'm scaling the UI by a factor of 200% and its not a HiDPI monitor, just a humble 1080p one, so the effective horizontal resolution of my browser's viewport is 960 pixels. At that resolution, line of text on danluu.com and in comment sections on HN are longer than I would prefer them to be, but they're not so long as to be a significant annoyance. Back when I used an OS that didn't let me scale the UI, I'd occasionally make the browser window narrower to make the lines of text on a site more reasonable, but I definitely appreciated it when sites made it unnecessary for me to do that, by specifying body {max-width: 45em;} or something.
- reitanuki 2y ago
  ooi what's wrong with Simon Willison's site? I suspect my site would fall afoul of some of the taste around here but I didn't think Simon's was bad as far as they went.
  - rednafi 2y ago
    I am a regular reader of Simon Willison. The content is fantastic but on mobile, I find the layout a bit confusing.
- garof 2y ago
  For the lazy who don't know some of these: https://drewdevault.com https://drewdevault.com https://fabiensanglard.net https://fabiensanglard.net https://danluu.com https://danluu.com Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    Reader mode works great on danluu.com, as does a very simple user stylesheet along the lines of https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
  - emmanueloga_ 2y ago
    The "danluu layout" takes minimalism too far in my opinion, and getting in and out of some readability mode can be slow/annoying. Just a lil bit of padding here and there could improve the presentation a lot, but I'm guessing the author consider this design kind of a trademark by now.
elevatedastalt 2y ago
I don't think Gwern's site is optimized for mobile viewing at all. It works great on a desktop and I think that's where such long form is best consumed.
gwern 2y ago
Yeah, it used to be fast, but then you add features and have pages with a ridiculous amount of stuff in them compared to most pages (every DOM element costs you), and, well... We plan to go back and optimize stuff once one last feature is in. (It's a novel feature I came up with I've never seen anywhere else: I call it the 'browsing history' feature. Every link you pop up will also be transcluded into a section at the end, so you can create your own bibliography as you go. This means you don't have to have FOMO about reading every popup or tab as you go, and you can rebrowse what might be interesting at the end, or even snapshot the page with a particular set of links having been browsed.) Achmiz meant to get around to it a while ago but among other things, he got nerdsniped by studying high-dimensional geometry for modeling an extradimensional invasion in his current D&D campaign: https://blog.obormot.net/Extreme-D-D-DIY-adventures-in-hypergeometry-procedural-generation-and-software-development-part-1 https://blog.obormot.net/Extreme-D-D-DIY-adventures-in-hyper...
alwillis 2y ago
> While I admire Gwern's work a lot, I often find his website is trying to do so much that my browser will really struggle. As a web developer, I often look at the HTML and CSS of interesting websites… I gotta say, I've never seen anything quite like https://gwern.net https://gwern.net. It's an impressive looking site IMHO; but pretty much everything he's done is very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources, like downloading 14 fonts. He's doing everything you're not supposed to do if you care about your users or performance in general. Every page is pretty much like this. From cssstats.com: Rules: 1,484 Selectors: 1,757 Declarations: 3,914 Properties: 243 Total Selectors by Type Selectors are the part of a CSS ruleset that describes what elements in a document the rule will match. ID: 534 Class: 1,516 Pseudo Class: 296 Pseudo Element: 382 It just goes on and on like this.
- gwern 2y ago
  I don't think any of the numbers you quote are really that meaningful. Like you are quoting IDs - what is the cost of an ID? If all the IDs were stripped, would that even make a measurable difference? Really now. Similarly for those other numbers about selectors or classes. How much of a performance burden are those, really? Not the numbers punched out by some cargo cult calculator tool - what is the actual impact? (I would try to compare cssstats.com's numbers for Gwern.net to sites we can all agree are "very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources", like Medium.com or Substack... except it breaks and won't even report numbers.) > It's an impressive looking site IMHO; but pretty much everything he's done is very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources, That seems like an extreme take. 'Pretty much everything'? There's no feature you like or find useful? It's all a waste? Your non-wasteful user-friendly version of gwern.net just throws out everything like the dropcaps, the code folding, the popups, the transclusions, the sidenotes, the backlinks, the link-icons...? If that's not what you mean, can you point to a website which comes anywhere near Gwern.net in terms of supporting reading long, complex, heavily hyperlinked & annotated documents, and clearly outperforms it browser-wise? > like downloading 14 fonts. I'm not sure what page you are looking at, but what are these '14 fonts', exactly? It sounds like you're counting every font file without looking at them at all, and you are including, eg, the dropcaps which are subset to 1 letter per font file and so are efficiently only ~1-10kb each, or the link-icon font file, which is like 5kb compressed and saves requesting a bunch of SVG icon files, or the Quivira fallback (to avoid box Unicode garbage) which shouldn't be used in most pages but if it is, that's fine, because it's all of 3.5kb. Surely any performance woes do not come from downloading 5kb to draw a fancy 'A' at the beginning of the article, and is worth it for such a signature bit of visual style... Even the regular font files are subsetted to save space. (I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of websites with just '1 font' which weigh more than those '14'.) So the font files do not seem like they are 'wasteful' to me.

rednafi 2y ago

Ditto. I like Gwern's content but not much the presentation. The same goes for Simon Willison's site. I much prefer the brutalist look of Drew Devault, Fabien Sanglard, or Dan Luu's site.

gnicholas 2y ago
I don't mind Drew or Fabien's layout, which have a reasonable column width. But Dan's site is unreadable for me (at least on desktop) without reader mode. What would be the reason for choosing to have full-width text on a blog?
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  Dan's website is a great example of the pendulum swinging in the other direction to malicious non-conformism. Yes, UXers have made modern web design hell, but presenting a raw unstyled html isn't respecting your user much either.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  I think that is not so simple to solve. Limit it to some column width? Someone will complain that it only uses one third of their screen. Unlimited width? Someone will complain about whole width text. But the good thing is, that there is reader mode and evem if there wasn't, you could zoom in or resize the browser window or send to new window and resoze only that.
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    Yeah, most browsers do have reader mode now. I honestly don't love them because they're typically not customizable, and are sometimes too narrow for my taste. I wouldn't mind resizing the browser window except that with tabbed systems that means you're resizing all of the tabs at the same time. I tend to think that if you make the width something in the neighborhood of what the NYT, Medium, or other well-known sites use, people won't complain. But I could be wrong!
    - zelphirkalt 2y ago
      Firefox reader mode is a little bit customizable. Font size column width and so. Cumbersome, but one can change width of a single tab by using the inspector and using the responsive design mode. Perhaps there is room for another Firefox feature to limit width of a page. Perhaps multi-column mode, where one can for example split the page in 3 columns and each column displays, what could not be fit on the previous column. And resizable columns maybe.
- account42 2y ago
  What would be the reason for choosing a browser width wider than what you can comfortably read?
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Huh: my browser is always maximized (the width of my monitor) as are all the other apps I regularly use -- similar to how an iPad worked before iPadOS introduced multitasking -- but then I'm scaling the UI by a factor of 200% and its not a HiDPI monitor, just a humble 1080p one, so the effective horizontal resolution of my browser's viewport is 960 pixels. At that resolution, line of text on danluu.com and in comment sections on HN are longer than I would prefer them to be, but they're not so long as to be a significant annoyance. Back when I used an OS that didn't let me scale the UI, I'd occasionally make the browser window narrower to make the lines of text on a site more reasonable, but I definitely appreciated it when sites made it unnecessary for me to do that, by specifying body {max-width: 45em;} or something.
reitanuki 2y ago
ooi what's wrong with Simon Willison's site? I suspect my site would fall afoul of some of the taste around here but I didn't think Simon's was bad as far as they went.
- rednafi 2y ago
  I am a regular reader of Simon Willison. The content is fantastic but on mobile, I find the layout a bit confusing.
garof 2y ago
For the lazy who don't know some of these: https://drewdevault.com https://drewdevault.com https://fabiensanglard.net https://fabiensanglard.net https://danluu.com https://danluu.com Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  Reader mode works great on danluu.com, as does a very simple user stylesheet along the lines of https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com https://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
- emmanueloga_ 2y ago
  The "danluu layout" takes minimalism too far in my opinion, and getting in and out of some readability mode can be slow/annoying. Just a lil bit of padding here and there could improve the presentation a lot, but I'm guessing the author consider this design kind of a trademark by now.

elevatedastalt 2y ago

I don't think Gwern's site is optimized for mobile viewing at all. It works great on a desktop and I think that's where such long form is best consumed.

gwern 2y ago

Yeah, it used to be fast, but then you add features and have pages with a ridiculous amount of stuff in them compared to most pages (every DOM element costs you), and, well... We plan to go back and optimize stuff once one last feature is in. (It's a novel feature I came up with I've never seen anywhere else: I call it the 'browsing history' feature. Every link you pop up will also be transcluded into a section at the end, so you can create your own bibliography as you go. This means you don't have to have FOMO about reading every popup or tab as you go, and you can rebrowse what might be interesting at the end, or even snapshot the page with a particular set of links having been browsed.) Achmiz meant to get around to it a while ago but among other things, he got nerdsniped by studying high-dimensional geometry for modeling an extradimensional invasion in his current D&D campaign: https://blog.obormot.net/Extreme-D-D-DIY-adventures-in-hypergeometry-procedural-generation-and-software-development-part-1 https://blog.obormot.net/Extreme-D-D-DIY-adventures-in-hyper...

alwillis 2y ago

> While I admire Gwern's work a lot, I often find his website is trying to do so much that my browser will really struggle. As a web developer, I often look at the HTML and CSS of interesting websites… I gotta say, I've never seen anything quite like https://gwern.net https://gwern.net. It's an impressive looking site IMHO; but pretty much everything he's done is very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources, like downloading 14 fonts. He's doing everything you're not supposed to do if you care about your users or performance in general. Every page is pretty much like this. From cssstats.com: Rules: 1,484 Selectors: 1,757 Declarations: 3,914 Properties: 243 Total Selectors by Type Selectors are the part of a CSS ruleset that describes what elements in a document the rule will match. ID: 534 Class: 1,516 Pseudo Class: 296 Pseudo Element: 382 It just goes on and on like this.

gwern 2y ago
I don't think any of the numbers you quote are really that meaningful. Like you are quoting IDs - what is the cost of an ID? If all the IDs were stripped, would that even make a measurable difference? Really now. Similarly for those other numbers about selectors or classes. How much of a performance burden are those, really? Not the numbers punched out by some cargo cult calculator tool - what is the actual impact? (I would try to compare cssstats.com's numbers for Gwern.net to sites we can all agree are "very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources", like Medium.com or Substack... except it breaks and won't even report numbers.) > It's an impressive looking site IMHO; but pretty much everything he's done is very user hostile and wasteful of the user's resources, That seems like an extreme take. 'Pretty much everything'? There's no feature you like or find useful? It's all a waste? Your non-wasteful user-friendly version of gwern.net just throws out everything like the dropcaps, the code folding, the popups, the transclusions, the sidenotes, the backlinks, the link-icons...? If that's not what you mean, can you point to a website which comes anywhere near Gwern.net in terms of supporting reading long, complex, heavily hyperlinked & annotated documents, and clearly outperforms it browser-wise? > like downloading 14 fonts. I'm not sure what page you are looking at, but what are these '14 fonts', exactly? It sounds like you're counting every font file without looking at them at all, and you are including, eg, the dropcaps which are subset to 1 letter per font file and so are efficiently only ~1-10kb each, or the link-icon font file, which is like 5kb compressed and saves requesting a bunch of SVG icon files, or the Quivira fallback (to avoid box Unicode garbage) which shouldn't be used in most pages but if it is, that's fine, because it's all of 3.5kb. Surely any performance woes do not come from downloading 5kb to draw a fancy 'A' at the beginning of the article, and is worth it for such a signature bit of visual style... Even the regular font files are subsetted to save space. (I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of websites with just '1 font' which weigh more than those '14'.) So the font files do not seem like they are 'wasteful' to me.