The font is indeed very distracting to me. Some fonts (and font features) are really meant for print rather than for screen consumption.
Disabling the font makes it a nicer reading experience.
There is something similarly strange about the writing style of the article. I feel like I'm supposed to sit down, breathe out, make a cup of tea, and delve into this "intriguing, hand-crafted story."
In reality, I'd guess most people will attempt to read this story on their phone while on the toilet.
Love the effort in writing the book though. Not sure why exactly the author focused on months in particular while there are so many things they could have added (such as name of the days, counting systems, and everything else necessary that would make it possible for someone to implement a clock by using full words from that language).
I usually disable all website-specified fonts. It makes the web more tolerable. I have never come across any web fonts that made my experience any better.
Dealing with this many languages is difficult. I recently worked on a project where many of the languages were not supported by Windows, so the locale information wasn't easily selectable as resource files in ASP.NET.
If translating content to 1000+ languages interests you, the JWs have released, at times, some articles explaining how they achieve simultaneous publishing in 1034 languages using a piece of software from Oxford called MEPS [ https://www.jw.org/en/choose-language ].
JW and Swe here with xp volunteering on projects internally!
While not being directly involved with meps development ( there is so many different depts and service to volunteer and help out), I know that the MEPS has always been an umbrella for the multi lingual publishing tools.
At its origin it was a revolutionary system that helped layout, compositing and preprint workflows and scaled to a Hundred something langs an provided features we take for granted today (typesetting and automatic layouting in 120+ Lang’s well before it was cool)
Nowadays it’s highly probable that the meps also encompasses web publishing workflows (now in 1000+ Langs), pdf, Braille and print, using whatever industry standard appropriate and filling the gaps where commercial products fall short ( its a quite unique set of challenge that would stress test any CMS and publishing software)
Finally I have lots of friends working as volunteers in the content translation itself and I’m even more amazed by the quality of training, quality assurance process and attention to detail.
For instance small teams of translators are geographically located where the target language are spoken idiomatically (even for small communities) to ensure smooth and practical translations.
Just imagine having to coordinate hundreds of distributed teams in every single country and region of the world, all volunteers, and maintaining high quality translation while most of translators are locals with only goodwill and no formal training in translation ( sometimes even dictionaries does not exist )
And of course, no corporate backing, and strictly every single member is a volunteer !
Pretty impressive, thanks! It is quite a challenge that I've been tinkering with for over ten years now, really giving Unicode a workout. Plus, often the pre-modified characters (say, for the sake of argument, "a" with an acute accent) often don't turn out well in some fonts and I would have to fix that by using the regular character plus the combining character — two Unicode entities — then manipulating the latter with inline CSS to position it pixel by pixel.
I also faced the challenge of combining Arabic and/or Hebrew (which read right-to-left) and Roman in the same line. It drove both my browser and text editor nuts. In at least one such case in the book, Mozarabic, where I needed all three, separated by slashes, I just went for the nuclear option of simply bitmapping them.
As the title implies, I was able to exploit Google's Noto series to the hilt for my book. The Cardo I'm using for the body copy (sorry that some don't care for the ligatures, which I deliberately sought) was originally a web display-only font, but that's been fixed. Also, its italics wouldn't respond to CSS; fixed, also.
This is great! And I like the site design, to. It works on mobile as long as I remember to keep my thumb away from the edge so I don't just scroll the outer page.
But you don't mention the connection to Google Noto. I had to look it up. It's a font (family) that has extremely wide coverage of glyphs for different languages.
> It works on mobile as long as I remember to keep my thumb away from the edge so I don't just scroll the outer page.
I usually don't like to comment on page issues, but since yours is the top comment, just wanted to put down my objection, lest I see in horror someone else copy this design.
If you have a "dual scroll bar" problem, just stop right there, your site is broken. I didn't even bother reading the whole thing because I thought scrolling was highjacked and I couldn't tell how long the article was. I despised everything about this design.
There was a technical glitch involving the URL I gave, which caused much of the format misery, and by the time I noticed, it was too late for me edit the post to change that. So I got to sit all day Saturday as the complaints rolled in, helpless. Live and learn!
And then the site uses two fixed divs set to overflow hidden, which causes the site to have three scrollbars, one window scrollbar and one for each of the divs.
I think the site design hasn't been updated in a long while.
Those things could be easily fixed without having to do a complete redesign.
but a new layout doesn't make this much easier to read. the writing style mirrors the site layout - it's more for the author's amusement than the benefit of the reader.
If I hit page down, it scrolls the size of the frame, and not my screen. The frame is taller than my screen, so page down scrolls more than a screen full. I would have to use arrow keys or the mouse wheel to read it.
I tried scaling the page down so that the frame fits on screen, but page down still scrolls too far, somehow?
Weird. Naturally it works beautifully on mine with two different browsers, though I'm not in the habit of using the page-down key. I'll have to investigate that one further, I guess.
Works as it should for me too, on desktop Firefox here. Site design and fonts are quite nice. People on HN often lament the death of the "old web", but when we do get a site handwritten and with a personality, they turn around and say it is not usable. The strength of humans is our flexibility. We're not computer programs that throw an exception the moment their api is violated and an unexpected input happens.
Just put the content on the page, with each section left to size itself based on however-much content is in it, instead of giving each section its own scrollbar at least?
Looking at your source code, any reason you're doing hand-rolled css, layouts, scrollable divs with main content, inline css?
I remember doing this 15 years ago.
Today this is a problem that was solved dozens of times, from Bootstrap, to Zurb and Tailwind - with productivity, accessibility and variety of devices and screen-sizes in mind.
Your website is unpleasant to use and scroll. It feels you're reinventing the wheel just for the sake of it?
I write my own css for my statically generated website (andrewzah.com). The problem with bootstrap etc is exactly that they’re aimed at being generic. They’re not specific enough to do what I want quite how I want it… and there’s the burden of learning them.
It’s a lot easier to start with a good, semantic html structure and come up with exactly the CSS that one needs, rather than continually fight a system aimed at no one in particular.
Not to mention the bloat of unnecessary CSS/JS that you don’t actually need.
Disabling the font makes it a nicer reading experience.
There is something similarly strange about the writing style of the article. I feel like I'm supposed to sit down, breathe out, make a cup of tea, and delve into this "intriguing, hand-crafted story."
In reality, I'd guess most people will attempt to read this story on their phone while on the toilet.
Love the effort in writing the book though. Not sure why exactly the author focused on months in particular while there are so many things they could have added (such as name of the days, counting systems, and everything else necessary that would make it possible for someone to implement a clock by using full words from that language).