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Your web browser is broken. Well, they all are. Browsers on small screens should be built to browse web pages on small screens. There are seemingly obvious thin
by qwery 3y ago
Your web browser is broken. Well, they all are. Browsers on small screens should be built to browse web pages on small screens. There are seemingly obvious things to do like increasing font sizes[0] and margins -- the browser decides what to do with the content, after all. But such things aren't true solutions when the page is designed for a different device / resolution / form factor[1].
Your problem is with input though -- making elements bigger is a hacky solution at best.
Browsers on touch screens should be built to browse web pages on touch screens.
Touch input events are a particularly poor representation of the operator's intent -- compared to keys, pointing device with cursor, etc. -- yet a lot of software built for touch seems to assume the opposite.
The software decides that the user definitely wants to click on something and it just needs to find which thing.
As all good web browsers know, the extremely precise touch event position corresponds exactly to the (region of the) element that the user wants to click on. This is a certainty[2]. So what if the user tapped precisely on a background element for no reason at all? So what if there are multiple clickable things nearby? The user would have sent different coordinates if they wanted to click somewhere else.
[0] you generally do get some control over this, in lieu of a solution to the problem
[1] and the browser must, as much as possible, style the content in the way (not-) specified, even at the cost of the user experience / accessibility
[2] It is, by definition, without doubt. A fact. A universal truth. A ---
- tredre3 3y agoWeb browsers (and the whole touch input stack really) are already fully aware of touch precision and do very clever things to infer what you're actually trying to touch. In my experience it's already surprisingly accurate, too. Saying that making things bigger isn't a solution is nonsense. Shifting blames to browser makers is even less of a solution. Making HN 200% bigger if it detect a small screen would fix most issues and it's 3 lines of CSS. But sure, let's wait until that magical browser you describe arrives to fix everything instead. Any day now.
- qwery 3y agoThe whole stack is undoubtedly doing a heap of clever things, they are very impressive devices. I'm not sure what "fully aware of touch precision" means exactly. I mentioned precision a few times to hint at the common misunderstandings about precision and the irony of interpreting subpixel touch coordinates as literal point/s that the user touched, deliberately and specifically, when they were generated from someone smooshing a number of body parts against a small touch screen display. Simply making things bigger isn't a comprehensive solution (to what is a difficult user input problem, as you know), but it is something that can help, and crucially can be implemented in web browsers. I want web browsers to be less cowed by web designers/developers, to empower the users. I'm not trying to change your mind/experience. I know that a lot of people must be similarly unaffected by such issues. Not everyone is in that privileged group, however.