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It still blows my mind that the text on the HN homepage is unreadably too small on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Surely you guys have enough money and/or technical chop

It still blows my mind that the text on the HN homepage is unreadably too small on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Surely you guys have enough money and/or technical chops to fix that?

jacquesm 11y ago
The Galaxy S4 came out well after HN was built, why should the burden be on HN, why don't you say 'Surely Samsung would have the money and/or technical chops to make a product compatible with the web as existed prior to when the device was launched?'. edit: hello downvoters, would you be equally upset that a windows 95 machine would refuse to run office 2000?
- jamespo 11y ago
  Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.
    - devsquid 11y ago
      How does that make sense? The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of the screen.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        Either I don't understand you or we're in agreement. Yes, the device's web browser should do the adaptation, sites can tell browsers whatever they want and browsers are totally free to ignore that information, after all the browser and the device have more information to work with.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
eps 11y ago
It's obviously not a matter of money/chops, but that of the priorities.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Sure, but how hard is it to write some basic CSS? I mean we are talking about making the text bigger when viewed on mobile devices, right?
  - zupa-hu 11y ago
    Maybe it's not an issue for everyone. I'm quite happy with how it is.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Three browsers across a very large variety of screen sizes, resolutions, colour depths and so on. Clearly writing some 'basic CSS' is not hard but writing future proof CSS that will remain compatible with all the devices that do not exist yet is next to impossible. Therefore backwards compatibility is expected of new devices rather than that we expect existing websites to be forward compatible with devices that do not even exist. And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices (which is the way we nowadays go about developing commercial websites, and which is entirely wrong, if a website works on one browser it should work on all, a ship which has long ago sailed but which made good sense at the time and was one of the main reasons the web caught on over all those proprietary and fragmented efforts at information dissemination that preceded it).
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      >>Clearly writing some 'basic CSS' is not hard but writing future proof CSS that will remain compatible with all the devices that do not exist yet is next to impossible. Considering that the problem exists in the present and is very real, I'm not sure why not being able to write future-proof CSS is a big issue. How often do commonly-used CSS properties (e.g. font-size) become outdated? When was the last time you had to re-write the stylesheets on one of your websites? >>And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices I think the HN userbase is not only capable but also would be willing to perform this testing. Deploy the website on a separate directory (e.g. news.combinator.com/newdesign/etc.) and direct users who opt into the beta there. Heck, I bet there's quite a few people here who would love to take it on as a volunteer project.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
You could enlarge the text?
- thameera 11y ago
  Except most browsers don't reflow the text correctly so you have to horizontally scroll.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    So, the browser's failure to behave the way every browser for decades upon decades has been supposed to behave is actually a problem with the website? Show me a browser from before 2005 that won't reflow text.

It still blows my mind that the text on the HN homepage is unreadably too small on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Surely you guys have enough money and/or technical chops to fix that?

jacquesm 11y ago

The Galaxy S4 came out well after HN was built, why should the burden be on HN, why don't you say 'Surely Samsung would have the money and/or technical chops to make a product compatible with the web as existed prior to when the device was launched?'. edit: hello downvoters, would you be equally upset that a windows 95 machine would refuse to run office 2000?

jamespo 11y ago
Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen
- jacquesm 11y ago
  It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.
  - devsquid 11y ago
    How does that make sense? The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of the screen.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Either I don't understand you or we're in agreement. Yes, the device's web browser should do the adaptation, sites can tell browsers whatever they want and browsers are totally free to ignore that information, after all the browser and the device have more information to work with.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

eps 11y ago

It's obviously not a matter of money/chops, but that of the priorities.

enraged_camel 11y ago
Sure, but how hard is it to write some basic CSS? I mean we are talking about making the text bigger when viewed on mobile devices, right?
- zupa-hu 11y ago
  Maybe it's not an issue for everyone. I'm quite happy with how it is.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Three browsers across a very large variety of screen sizes, resolutions, colour depths and so on. Clearly writing some 'basic CSS' is not hard but writing future proof CSS that will remain compatible with all the devices that do not exist yet is next to impossible. Therefore backwards compatibility is expected of new devices rather than that we expect existing websites to be forward compatible with devices that do not even exist. And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices (which is the way we nowadays go about developing commercial websites, and which is entirely wrong, if a website works on one browser it should work on all, a ship which has long ago sailed but which made good sense at the time and was one of the main reasons the web caught on over all those proprietary and fragmented efforts at information dissemination that preceded it).
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>Clearly writing some 'basic CSS' is not hard but writing future proof CSS that will remain compatible with all the devices that do not exist yet is next to impossible. Considering that the problem exists in the present and is very real, I'm not sure why not being able to write future-proof CSS is a big issue. How often do commonly-used CSS properties (e.g. font-size) become outdated? When was the last time you had to re-write the stylesheets on one of your websites? >>And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices I think the HN userbase is not only capable but also would be willing to perform this testing. Deploy the website on a separate directory (e.g. news.combinator.com/newdesign/etc.) and direct users who opt into the beta there. Heck, I bet there's quite a few people here who would love to take it on as a volunteer project.

thaumasiotes 11y ago

You could enlarge the text?

thameera 11y ago
Except most browsers don't reflow the text correctly so you have to horizontally scroll.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  So, the browser's failure to behave the way every browser for decades upon decades has been supposed to behave is actually a problem with the website? Show me a browser from before 2005 that won't reflow text.