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> Do you remember ever enjoying using/reading a website with more than two columns? I don’t. Another one of the things I really miss about the pre-JavaScript,
by zeveb 10y ago
> Do you remember ever enjoying using/reading a website with more than two columns? I don’t.
Another one of the things I really miss about the pre-JavaScript, pre-CSS, document-oriented (as opposed to the current experience-oriented) web is being able to make my browser window half or a third of my screen, and having documents be eminently readable. That was really, really nice. Try it now, though, and nothing really works correctly. Which is weird, because a third-width window on a laptop or desktop has roughly the same proportions as a phone in vertical layout.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoOh, god yes. If you need a special, mobile only site, you're doing it wrong. HN is living proof.
- cocotino 10y agoThat's correct for many websites, but others such as Facebook have such a complicated but still correct UI on a desktop that it's appropriate to have two different websites.
- babuskov 10y ago> correct UI on a desktop Nope. That was true about a year ago, but not anymore. Facebook UI on a desktop is horrible. Try using it with 1024px wide screen - most apps/games aren't fully visible because they give 760px to the canvas and the rest of their UI is not responsive - so either the ad space on the right or the content (app/game) has to suffer.
- Bahamut 10y agoIt certainly needs more love - another problematic part is when you have messages open but you want to see stuff on the column to the right of the newsfeed. Its design leaves some to be desired.
- babuskov 10y agoI just discovered another problem today. You cannot paste text into chat (using latest Firefox stable on Mac OSX).
- kristianc 10y agoHN has a mobile-only site, it was updated quite recently. It's been quite subtly done, but it's made upvoting and accessing comments a lot easier.
- lorenzhs 10y agoNo, HN has a responsive layout - it works well on any screen size. (Well, hitting the correct arrow on mobile is still hard, but at least there's an undo button now).
- collyw 10y agoWell it doesn't work very well on my phone. By the time I zoom enough to be able to read the text, its usually going way past the right hand side.
- mynewtb 10y agoUse a browser that reflows text then and complain to the creators of your current browser that they don't support the integral feature for small screen web enjoyment.
- ebbv 10y agoHN is terrible on my iPhone 5S. Everything is way too small, it's extremely hard to tap on names, arrows or anything else except headlines.
- mynewtb 10y agoIt is great on my Samsung Galaxy S. If I zoom in, long lines simply reflow to fit the screen. It means that I can dynamically adjust the font size to suit any accessibility needs or situation.
- Flockster 10y agoThat's a pretty nice feature. Is there a browser on iOS which supports that? Safari and Chrome do not seem to reflow.
- leeoniya 10y ago> HN is living proof. of what? that you don't need a separate mobile site (or js) to show a most basic wall of text? open up amazon.com or walmart.com and see how your justification holds up. certainly, there are simple layouts with sparse content that can be made responsive easily (blogs, image portfolios, etc) but this is a far cry from proof that a broad statement is at all applicable.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoFair enough. But how many sites on the internet that have special mobile sites are, at the end of the day, just showing walls of text?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 10y ago>of what? that you don't need a separate mobile site (or js) to show a most basic wall of text? Most sites only need to show just that. And fail miserably at it. >open up amazon.com or walmart.com and see how your justification holds up. 90% of sites are content based, not Amazon or Walmart. And even then could do with a much simpler layout.
- paulddraper 10y agoThose are a pretty important 10%.
- awesomerobot 10y agoThere are plenty of ecommerce sites doing the mobile/desktop split generally well (and making millions of sales in the process). HN is literally text-only.
- mintplant 10y agoI find this funny now because HN used to be awful on mobile, due to an inflexible tables-for-layout design. One that couldn't easily be changed, either, because everyone's clients relied on the exact structure of the markup for screen scraping.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThankfully, this has been fixed.
- derefr 10y agoI know it's a solved problem now, but: > One that couldn't easily be changed, either, because everyone's clients relied on the exact structure of the markup for screen scraping. This doesn't seem like that hard a problem. Presumably the robots all sent their own distinct UA strings (as scrapers only get written to imitate browser UA strings if you ban non-browser UA strings.) So why not just filter your logs to find all the known scrapers, serve anything with those exact UA strings "legacy" table-based responses, and serve everyone else the new layout?
- chasingtheflow 10y agoThen you have to maintain two layouts in perpetuity.
- odbol_ 10y agoHN is terrible on mobile. Their column sizes are just slightly too big for my screen (not adaptive), so I have to scroll to read the last word of every line. And on desktop, it just expands to the whole page width, even through everyone knows you should never have a line of text that's longer than 600px. Hackers they may be, web developers they are not.
- lorenzhs 10y agoI have two screens, one of which is vertical. It's the one I usually use for web browsing, because reading is just nicer if the columns aren't too wide and lots of stuff fits vertically (I can see an entire page of Google search results, really nice!). Tons of sites assume a width of something that is obviously greater than 1080 pixels and break in awful ways.
- mikeryan 10y agoAnother one of the things I really miss about the pre-JavaScript, pre-CSS, document-oriented (as opposed to the current experience-oriented) web is being able to make my browser window half or a third of my screen, and having documents be eminently readable. Man what I remember was doing multiple columns using Tables in HTML which never worked in anything under a 700px resolution. Case in point this beast: https://web.archive.org/web/20010503213654/http://www.techtv.com/techtv/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010503213654/http://www.techtv...
- hrayr 10y agoAh techtv, you bring back lots of memories.
- wlesieutre 10y agoYeah but you could scroll your window horizontally to only keep the useful column visible. Now it's "HEY I SEE YOUR SCREEN ISN'T WIDE ENOUGH TO FIT TWO COLUMNS OF ADVERTISING ON THE SIDES. HAVE THE CELL PHONE LAYOUT WITH FULLSCREEN POPUPS INSTEAD!"
- hx87 10y agoNot to mention if you're actually on a cell phone it's "HEY YOU JUST CLICKED ON A LINK, BUT SINCE YOUR PHONE IS SO SLOW AND MY SITE IS SO BLOATED, BY THE TIME YOUR CLICK WAS REGISTERED SOME OTHER CONTENT LOADED IN THAT LOCATION. YOU ACTUALLY MEANT TO CLICK ON THIS AD, AMIRITE?"
- stcredzero 10y agoMost of the web was more usable on mobile before mobile sites started pandering to low IQ people who couldn't figure out how to pinch zoom and scroll. Now it's only the largest sites that can afford the developer know-how to make their mobile site actually usable. (And not all of them bother.) If you are a small operation that still makes your mobile web site usable, then power to you.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
- RUG3Y 10y agoI started designing web pages in 1995. While they weren't works of art, I really miss the simplicity and utility of the internet back then. Also, most content seemed to be really enthusiastic and less economically motivated. I wish we could get back to that.
- abpavel 10y ago+1, howewer I do recall countless "works best with minimum 800x600 resolution and Internet Explorer" disclaimers.
- CalRobert 10y agoYesterday I needed to look some stuff up while on an RPi with just Ubuntu server. Using Lynx on Google and Wikipedia brought that back a little bit. It was nice.
- rimantas 10y agoI just miss http://csszengarden.com/ http://csszengarden.com/ time.
- brightball 10y agoI really don't think it ever went away. It's just not popular for whatever reason.
- bunderbunder 10y agoI think because CSS layout without the aid of a CSS grid is so @$@% obtuse. Or at least, try as I might, I've yet to find a clear and comprehensive explanation of how to do it properly. So, despite thinking CSS Zen Garden is a work of beauty, for my own part I just throw bootstrap at it and get on with my life, and I'm not ashamed about it.
- zepolen 10y agoUse the grid to get a prototype up fast. Then you do the real work and convert it to media queries that fit your design.
- arikrak 10y agoOn HN you can do that and the text even gets larger.
- taneq 10y agoI run my monitors in portrait orientation, so I see everything in 1080x1920. Almost everything works fine. I do occasionally run across a site which uses fixed width divs and either won't squish down past 1280px, or gets all messed up because they plainly didn't test on narrow windows, but they're in the minority.
- antar 10y agoI am from the same period and I don't see what you're talking about. You're just old and you like old stuff. Old people like old stuff.