legibility

The reason is that HN has crappy typography and thus crappy legibility.

On the other hand, gray-on-white for the website's text is a questionable choice from a legibility perspective.

Can someone tell the designer of this website that thin fonts are not good for legibility?

Javascript isn't far off binary in terms of readability nowadays with the level of packing/minification, so legibility isn't a deciding factor.

It's because they're rendering text in jpegs which is not a great idea for legibility...

It's a fantastic book on typography, layout, font detail and suggested practices for legibility.

Great article, but a seemingly unfair comparisons granted the examples provided seem to have no baseline for differentiating legibility between the fonts.

I think this is an ugly, clumsy typeface, designed primarily for legibility in a particular small application (the watch).

Humanist sans fonts have been demonstrated to have higher legibility in print.

Do people put these background patterns behind text expressly to hamper legibility?

It's a weird nitpick, but it actually detracts from the legibility.

We can agree to disagree on legibility and what is 'artful' for algorithms much like art fans of the last century wrestled with abstract art.

Finally, the questions of legibility and maintenance are best "shunted" to properly documenting the macro as you would any other function in your project (e.g.

> The new filing comes as US District Judge George King was just two days away from holding a hearing > That important line of text published underneath the song's lyrics was "blurred almost beyond legibility" in the copy that Warner/Chappell handed over in discovery.

In fact, these sort of "mini-macros" are best for addressing the problems of concern separation, legibility, maintainability, and refactoring: the "with-file" macro is a prime example of separating the concern of managing file handles from the code which uses the file.