Details on this: This is a restyled version of wikipedia content that looks a lot better. They have a browser extension that redirects you to the wikiwand version of the same page, which is the same content with much nicer formatting. It really looks quite a bit better.
Caveats: you have to trust a non-wikipedia site to keep their copy up to date, not to info-mine you, and if you quickly send someone a link, they may not realize they're still sort of on wikipedia.
On the second link, it fits all onto my screen. On the first link, I have to scroll. Why is this better? Sure it looks "nice" but if I want to look at nice things there are other websites. I want wikipedia to be useful, not look nice.
I disagree, this is worse in every way. Too much white space. Literally every website today needs to reduce the padding and margins by 80% and they could present the same data in dense, single page without scrolling.
Also large fonts need to die. I love HN because I can see so much in one shot, can always increase fonts with Ctrl +
You can't really exceed a a certain number of characters per line without sacrificing readability and you can't restrict the line length without padding the container, so I'm not really sure what you think the goal of typography should be. It's certainly not to reduce scrolling; there is no "fold" on the web.
I like Wall Street Journal and their typography, https://wsj.com and how they write their articles. Not sure if it directly applies to Wikipedia, but I agree with your general point about typography - 80-120 character width seems ideal, any longer and it is tiring.
Perhaps we should go with columnar layout. I don't think it helps by adding a bunch of whitespace... ultimately, you're reducing the amount of information shown on a single page which could just be columnized.
It's possible that you're browsing on some configuration that makes Wikiwand display "large fonts" (mobile device? even then I haven't been able to reproduce), but Wikiwand isn't using large fonts. In fact, articles' font-size is set to 100% of the UA's preferred font-size, and then they use use a third-party font ("Lora") which actually makes text smaller than your typical serif font rendered at the same size.
> I love HN because I can see so much in one shot, can always increase fonts with Ctrl +
By the same token, you can always use Ctrl+- then for sites that use a "large font"[1], right?
Note that HN is actually screwing things up and using a "small" font. From news.css: "font-size: 9pt"(!). IMO, pulling shenanigans like that is actually pretty disrespectful to visitors. It's why I have to permanently browse HN at 133% zoom + force the rules for mobile devices to kick in. It's only at that point where text is displayed at my UA's correct size.
2 of them have normal sized text and 1 has a text that looks good on the designer's macbook. As it happens, the latter is borderline unusable -- an article not longer than a handful of tweets doesn't even fit on one page.
P.S. Until today, I genuinely thought that wikiwand was some kind of ad farm, from seeing it pop up in google search.
> 2 of them have normal sized text and 1 has [...]
No, one of them (Wikiwand) has "normal sized text", and the other two have objectively shrunken text. This is not a matter of opinion; this is fact. Both HN and Wikipedia, like I mentioned before, are overriding the text size in their stylesheets to force the main body text to display at a size smaller than the UA preferred size. Wikiwand is using the correct font scaling. If you have a problem with the size of the text on the Wikiwand page, it's because your UA is configured to show text at a size that you have a problem with. It's up to you to deal with that.
For an example of what properly-sized text looks like, have a look at http://cr.yp.to or http://danluu.com. These sites are not sending any "designer" styles to your browser (aside from the 8 lines of CSS for the latter, which don't affect the text size).
Besides that, your criticism of Wikiwand's design is dominated by details about its layout and not its text size. But I didn't say Wikiwand was the best layout in the world; it's not, and I don't even use it. But it's still not worse than Wikipedia's overly-designed Vector skin.
You are right, the font-size is not the main problem with Wikiwand. I tried zooming in until the text was the same size on the Vector skin and it's usable. Nevertheless, I don't think it's a coincidence that sites like old.reddit, HN and Wikipedia all use a similar font-size. Less so on Wikipedia, since the Vector redesign increased the size a bit.
I don't get what's wrong with the Vector skin though... The only thing I would change is the language options in the sidebar -- no reason for the collapsible search box thingy. Just list all the languages as tuples of (native name, name in current language). Other than that I think it's great, no doubt thanks to all the effort spent polishing it over the years.
The problem Wikiwand is trying to solve is better solved by browser zoom on large screens and a separate skin (or media queries I guess) on mobile. Setting UA font-size to make text readable (as opposed to customizing the relative sizing of different elements) has been obsolete pretty much since Opera introduced zoom. If a non-power user wants a site larger they'll just zoom in. If they want everything larger they'll apply the zoom to all pages (at least Chrome has this). Pretty much no one cares about UA's font-size. Certainly no lay person.
> What problem do you think it's trying to solve, and how does zooming solve it?
According to sibling subthreads here, a lack of readablity. Since I don't think line length matters much, making text larger is pretty much the only thing left. Zooming is the easiest way to achieve that. It also doesn't alter the layout of the site as much as simply increasing the font-size.
> By the same token, you can always use Ctrl+- then for sites that use a "large font", right?
Of course. Being a power user, I can even set the font-size ))
I'm just pointing out that expecting people to do the latter makes no sense unless they are a power user.
> making text larger is pretty much the only thing left
Wikiwand doesn't "make the text bigger". It leaves the text size alone. I've already mentioned this more than once. cf cr.yp.to, danluu.com.
> I'm just pointing out that expecting people to [set the font-size] makes no sense unless they are a power user.
I don't know what you think I'm saying. I'm not talking about power users. I'm saying that Wikipedia shouldn't be injecting rules for small font sizes in the main content. Everyone can leave the font size alone. Wikipedia cramming thousands of lines of CSS down the tubes, where the incorrect font size is among them, is like people who say "backslash" when dictating a URL—they're going out of their way and getting it wrong.
https://www.wikiwand.com/
I use it for 2 years now and it works just right.