Tufte CSS

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2015–2025), in 6 threads.

People raised many different problems with Tufte CSS, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Text runs under fingers on edge-to-edge phone screens, looking odd when reading2025-09-04
Clickable superscript footnote markers are not styled like links, so users may not realize they're clickable2023-03-05
Sidenotes collide with main text in portrait, forcing testing in both orientations2020-07-14
Users must experiment to discover tapping the icon expands margin notes2019-04-10
Wide text columns force sideways scrolling and browser window resizing on wide screens2019-04-10
Information presented in this style is hard to digest and hurts the eyes2017-11-06
Text is so large it becomes difficult to quickly scan the page2015-08-05
Sidebar content is hidden completely on narrow screens, losing crucial information2015-08-05
Sidebars take too much horizontal space, leaving main column almost unreadable on narrow windows2015-08-05