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!

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.

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 fixed that. It now accommodates cell width.

Unfortunately even on desktop, this is far from a nice experience... https://i.imgur.com/9oPlfkU.png

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?

It's somehow even worse now as the text takes up a third of the screen width and there's so much UI that doesn't tell you what it does.

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.

I make my website hand-made too, but because I found those tools to take too long to set up exactly how I want or they're too bulky.