4 ms·

Me: There's no way that's true looks in inspect element Me: I stand corrected

tyingq 6y ago
Never meet your heroes.
dunham 6y ago
Yeah, TIL. I've looked at the DOM before, but I saw multiple layers of tables and just assumed it was tables all the way down.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
Oh my goodness. It’s worse than you probably think. I built a HN dark mode web extension (you can grab it on my GH under the same handle if you want) because it’s been asked for so many times... And the weird hacks I had to do (even basing it off of dang’s invitation to solve it with HN’s base stylesheet) were so unusual that I didn’t feel comfortable promoting it here or anywhere. There’s not just weird 90s style table layout/spacer gifs, there’s also just random font tags and inline color attributes for important (eg branding) elements. Every downvote greying is inline color attributes. I’d originally planned on a companion stylesheet for Algolia search and it was so different I just bailed. Edit: honestly given the forum, I wish they’d open source some portion of HN to allow improvement. I really want a better mobile view, which is easily achievable with CSS without using the API and hosting another domain. If there’s so little interest in UX improvement effort this is something we could pick up the slack on.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I’m adding to specifically say to dang: you put probably horrific effort into maintaining this community and no ill will at all was meant to be directed toward you. I’m only sharing what I saw as a frame of reference for what’s currently in the HTML we consume every day and the challenge of tailoring it to other use cases.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
I thought the same, no way :) But, it makes a point. If nobody notices any side-effects of a bad design, is it still a bad design? The text-browser point made by the OP is the first that ran into this however most text browsers don't render the current 'best practice' (using CSS classes with margins) correctly either.
- livre 6y ago
  > current 'best practice' (using CSS classes with margins) If comments are nested unordered lists, why isn't the best practice a bunch of ul and li tags styled with CSS?
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Good point!
- greggturkington 6y ago
  > If nobody notices any side-effects of a bad design Lots of people notice, like OP and anyone using assistive technologies. So by your logic, it is bad design. Lists should be marked up as lists, tabular data marked up as tables. We ended this debate in...1996?
  - SirLotsaLocks 6y ago
    Yeah I wonder how this affects assistive technologies.
nerpderp82 6y ago
Stand horrified! What is wrong with tables?
- mintplant 6y ago
  Oh, every comment is a table row. But they're all in the same flat table, not nested.
heterodoxxed 6y ago
I'd love to hear the justification (no pun intended) for this.

Never meet your heroes.

Yeah, TIL. I've looked at the DOM before, but I saw multiple layers of tables and just assumed it was tables all the way down.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

Oh my goodness. It’s worse than you probably think. I built a HN dark mode web extension (you can grab it on my GH under the same handle if you want) because it’s been asked for so many times... And the weird hacks I had to do (even basing it off of dang’s invitation to solve it with HN’s base stylesheet) were so unusual that I didn’t feel comfortable promoting it here or anywhere. There’s not just weird 90s style table layout/spacer gifs, there’s also just random font tags and inline color attributes for important (eg branding) elements. Every downvote greying is inline color attributes. I’d originally planned on a companion stylesheet for Algolia search and it was so different I just bailed. Edit: honestly given the forum, I wish they’d open source some portion of HN to allow improvement. I really want a better mobile view, which is easily achievable with CSS without using the API and hosting another domain. If there’s so little interest in UX improvement effort this is something we could pick up the slack on.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
I’m adding to specifically say to dang: you put probably horrific effort into maintaining this community and no ill will at all was meant to be directed toward you. I’m only sharing what I saw as a frame of reference for what’s currently in the HTML we consume every day and the challenge of tailoring it to other use cases.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

I thought the same, no way :) But, it makes a point. If nobody notices any side-effects of a bad design, is it still a bad design? The text-browser point made by the OP is the first that ran into this however most text browsers don't render the current 'best practice' (using CSS classes with margins) correctly either.

livre 6y ago
> current 'best practice' (using CSS classes with margins) If comments are nested unordered lists, why isn't the best practice a bunch of ul and li tags styled with CSS?
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Good point!
greggturkington 6y ago
> If nobody notices any side-effects of a bad design Lots of people notice, like OP and anyone using assistive technologies. So by your logic, it is bad design. Lists should be marked up as lists, tabular data marked up as tables. We ended this debate in...1996?
- SirLotsaLocks 6y ago
  Yeah I wonder how this affects assistive technologies.

nerpderp82 6y ago

Stand horrified! What is wrong with tables?

mintplant 6y ago
Oh, every comment is a table row. But they're all in the same flat table, not nested.

heterodoxxed 6y ago

I'd love to hear the justification (no pun intended) for this.