5 ms·

> All forums with large threads have to paginate for performance, including HN. I can read "War and Peace" [1] as an HTML document on my 7 year old cheapo Andr

> All forums with large threads have to paginate for performance, including HN. I can read "War and Peace" [1] as an HTML document on my 7 year old cheapo Android phone. The browser even "streams" the data, displaying each chunk as it loads over a slow connection. As far as I know, you're correct that all forum software I've used paginates large threads, but I'm curious if they "have" to - as in, I think a team could probably build forum software that didn't paginate large threads (for reasonable definitions of "large") and still have good performance on a wide range of devices, if they were willing to make the necessary trade-offs. Whether those trade-offs are worth making, I don't know. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-h/2600-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-h/2600-h.htm

emodendroket 9y ago
Well, for one thing, there is nothing relational about a giant HTML document. But for another, is a page that long really the ideal experience for a discussion forum?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Why not allow the user or client define the pagination experience? You can get and read War and Peace (or other similarly large books -- I frequently reference Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations) at Project Gutenberg. As a single HTML file. The ability to search for any particular text instance within that document through browser capabilities is useful. As is, I agree at times, the ability to present the information as some sort of consistently paginated context. I'm thinking that somewhere between the 21st and 42nd centuries, computers might advance to a state where this is in fact possible.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    If I wanted to search a discussion thread I'd rather use a search function.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Why? I suppose you're going to respond with something along the lines of "because it's better than the browser's search function". But again: why is that? Why do the built-in browser tools suck as badly as they do? Example, outside of search: I realised some months back that a chief reason we have browser Reader Mode features, to uncrappify crappy site CSS, is because browser default styling ... is so horrible. And again: why is that? Why do we have craptastic CSS entity defaults when, with a very little work, every page could look, without any styling at all, pretty damned readable: http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/ http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/ (And if that's not your cuppa, then themes such that you get what you want -- Night Mode, or whateves.) Whatever browsers are being built for, it's not the people actually using them. /me looks suspiciously at Chrome => Google => Advertising.... Gee... I wonder why that might possibly be.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Well for one thing a browser search function can't distinguish between post content and the rest of the page. Also just one endless stream for a thread is practically unreadable.
        dredmorbius 9y ago
        And you realise that the browser has literally parsed the entier document object mode. If there's a semantic structure to be found, the browser knows what it is. Again: why is cabapility-in-the-browser so impossible to provide? Why isn't "search post" vs. "search comments" something scoped into a browser? If comments are a ... not entirely novel or unknown concept within Web design and activity, why are the abilities, say, to have browser-generated lists of authors, or search by author, or post/comment distinctions, or persistent reputations of commentators so that I can tell if @dredmorbius@news.ycombinator.com is just an asshat or a space alien cat who really knows where his towel is (and independent of whether or not dredmorbius maps to any particular known "real name")? It's not like the question's just come up within the past 5 hours. Really: Why is the browser so fucking limited in this regard? https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
mnutt 9y ago
War and Peace in HTML on Gutenberg is 12,000 paragraph tags, which is a lot but it's very easy to find forum threads with more than 12,000 posts. And each post is more than a paragraph tag, it's probably more like a dozen: the author name, an icon, the date, controls, etc. Even Chrome on my i7 doesn't instantly respond when loading those Gutenburg URLs.
- infogulch 9y ago
  The linked book is 3.9 MB. That you would have to reload every time a new post was appended to the end. This is a terrible counterexample.
  - mnutt 9y ago
    I'm not sure I understand the connection? My argument was that War and Peace sounds like an incredibly big thing to load because it took people a long time to read it in high school, but it's actually pretty simple, structure-wise, when compared to a discussion forum.
    - infogulch 9y ago
      I may have replied to the wrong parent. We are in agreement. :)

emodendroket 9y ago

Well, for one thing, there is nothing relational about a giant HTML document. But for another, is a page that long really the ideal experience for a discussion forum?

dredmorbius 9y ago
Why not allow the user or client define the pagination experience? You can get and read War and Peace (or other similarly large books -- I frequently reference Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations) at Project Gutenberg. As a single HTML file. The ability to search for any particular text instance within that document through browser capabilities is useful. As is, I agree at times, the ability to present the information as some sort of consistently paginated context. I'm thinking that somewhere between the 21st and 42nd centuries, computers might advance to a state where this is in fact possible.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  If I wanted to search a discussion thread I'd rather use a search function.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Why? I suppose you're going to respond with something along the lines of "because it's better than the browser's search function". But again: why is that? Why do the built-in browser tools suck as badly as they do? Example, outside of search: I realised some months back that a chief reason we have browser Reader Mode features, to uncrappify crappy site CSS, is because browser default styling ... is so horrible. And again: why is that? Why do we have craptastic CSS entity defaults when, with a very little work, every page could look, without any styling at all, pretty damned readable: http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/ http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/ (And if that's not your cuppa, then themes such that you get what you want -- Night Mode, or whateves.) Whatever browsers are being built for, it's not the people actually using them. /me looks suspiciously at Chrome => Google => Advertising.... Gee... I wonder why that might possibly be.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Well for one thing a browser search function can't distinguish between post content and the rest of the page. Also just one endless stream for a thread is practically unreadable.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        And you realise that the browser has literally parsed the entier document object mode. If there's a semantic structure to be found, the browser knows what it is. Again: why is cabapility-in-the-browser so impossible to provide? Why isn't "search post" vs. "search comments" something scoped into a browser? If comments are a ... not entirely novel or unknown concept within Web design and activity, why are the abilities, say, to have browser-generated lists of authors, or search by author, or post/comment distinctions, or persistent reputations of commentators so that I can tell if @dredmorbius@news.ycombinator.com is just an asshat or a space alien cat who really knows where his towel is (and independent of whether or not dredmorbius maps to any particular known "real name")? It's not like the question's just come up within the past 5 hours. Really: Why is the browser so fucking limited in this regard? https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/

mnutt 9y ago

War and Peace in HTML on Gutenberg is 12,000 paragraph tags, which is a lot but it's very easy to find forum threads with more than 12,000 posts. And each post is more than a paragraph tag, it's probably more like a dozen: the author name, an icon, the date, controls, etc. Even Chrome on my i7 doesn't instantly respond when loading those Gutenburg URLs.

infogulch 9y ago
The linked book is 3.9 MB. That you would have to reload every time a new post was appended to the end. This is a terrible counterexample.
- mnutt 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the connection? My argument was that War and Peace sounds like an incredibly big thing to load because it took people a long time to read it in high school, but it's actually pretty simple, structure-wise, when compared to a discussion forum.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    I may have replied to the wrong parent. We are in agreement. :)