The Times site used to be pretty distinctive – black font, more Times font – but now it’s pretty much the Washington Post. There is still some Times font, but it has the blue (oooh, it’s so easy on my fragile eyes) Arial headlines and giant “TV screen” picture, because us dumb consumers need to think we’re watching TV.

Also, resolution matters. I am on a laptop, and I never – never – make browser windows take up my entire screen. There are other things going on. So perhaps the Times’ TV screen works for people with huge monitors and browser windows who like to scroll a lot… but not me.

One good thing: The fonts were way too small, especially on the sea of headlines at the bottom of the page. They listened to feedback, though, and upped the size a few points.

And, again, major story content on the new site effectively ends at 620px. Which is inside the 640 margin that was the standard a decade ago.

Oh, bullshit. In any iteration of MacOS, the top menu bar is a constant. You can’t remove it. In any iteration of Windows, the bottom taskbar is there by default, and hiding it is stupid UI. Demanding the browser window to be at fullscreen is also bullshit. Work in DOS if you like, but I’ve been using windowed GUIs for well over a decade, thank you very much.

i believe that for web/computer screen purposes, Sans works out best and for type it’s Serif all the way.

That used to be the case, but with subpixel rendering on LCDs, the jaggedness of serif fonts—at least, those designed for screen use—is pretty much a thing of the past.

On serif fonts, everything I’ve seen says they are more readable than sans serif for blocks of text: is this wrong, or are screens different from paper?

Subtracting from available space due to docks, widgets or whatever else is your business. The screen is 1024. Personally, I’ve never seen the need for all that gimmickry. Having spent my most data processing intensive years in DOS, I’d rather not touch my mouse.

In any event the 1024 issue is a red herring. The major story content stops at 620px, as does all interior content. Even the below the fold story intros trim at 620 px. Being forced to measure this before I wrote it made me look closer at the layout. The care with which the elements are placed is a very elegant solution considering that in 15 months, half of you won’t be needing the workaround.

If you have Firefox, increasing type size is as simple as Ctrl + ‘+’ (Ctrl and the plus key). Minus to make it smaller.

But it seems that every week another of my favorite sites undergoes a makeover that makes it at best an unpleasant chore to view when it doesn’t crash my browser completely. I’m so sorry to be adding the nytimes.com to that list (along with my local papers and http://www.twinsbaseball.com); on the bright side perhaps the reduction of web-surfing options will ultimately increase my productivity.

Since MacClassic users probably only represent 5% of the Mac users who themselves represent 5% of the total PC market, I have no illusions that any web designer would consider back compatibility for my configuration. But I am surprised that anyone would look at the new nytimes.com design and consider it to be a marked improvement; even with my newer 14-inch iBook their site looks like a newspaper just threw up onto my screen.

(And in case anyone is wondering, although the content of CT posts is compressed to a 2 1/2 inch column surrounded by oceans of white space, it still renders well on my trusty blueberry.)

1024 on a laptop (manuactured in the past two years) in no big deal.

12in iBook, 1024×768, but the top menubar and dock (if you use it) take away that, so that you’ll get 1024×600 or, with the dock at the side, about 900×700. The same applies to the menubar and taskbar and desktop icons in Windows. If you browse at fullscreen, you have a too-wide page that looks very pretty until you try to read it.

Now, the hierarchy is much more rigid. (I think that’s bad, but feel free to try to convince me otherwise).

Observation number 2: No ads on the front page of the paper newspaper—why not be really bold and return to that paradigm for the web site? (Yes, I know the answer to that question)

Send money or kidnap Khoi Vinh href=”http://www.subtraction.com/about/” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.subtraction.com/about/ for us, then.

To begin with, what’s with the silly contributors setup in the upper left? Now and then I want to look up an old post by a particular writer. I never want to see a contributor’s bio, but I often do anyway.

Also, and I don’t remember this being on previous site: the link to “Today’s Paper” at the top—it’s nice to see what the dead-tree version is running on a given day (as the online version puts me into calendar vertigo whenever someone says they saw something in “today’s NYT” & I immediately check the Web version, which is a mix of yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s news).