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Hacker News still uses tables - for layout! But it always loads super fast, and it just works. We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. I

Hacker News still uses tables - for layout! But it always loads super fast, and it just works. We figured out how to display text on a web page decades ago. It's a shame more people aren't just doing it the direct way anymore. (Applications are a different matter obviously)

AJ007 5y ago
I would have been horrified if I saw what websites would look like in 2010+ when I first started using the web. The amount of unnecessary garbage and JS added to sites goes well beyond the adtech part. Half or more of sites using frameworks probably should never have used them. A good contrast is Reddit vs hn. Reddit’s current site is basically unusable and sluggish on modern hardware that can you could train ML models with.
- moritz 5y ago
  Just look at all the overhead of the article‘s website… When I first clicked the link the "website" crashed, so instead of the hot take, all I could read is that "addEventListener is not a function". That tells you all about the current state of affairs (Yes I get that webdevs' personal sites are their playground)
  - xemdetia 5y ago
    My favourite recent incarnation if this is when YouTube has its JavaScript go sideways and then it blames the internet being out instead of doing anything productive
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    That website also loads 184 KB of Javascript to display a 13 KB static document
    - raytube 5y ago
      It could sit on a shit ton of interpreter too.
ape4 5y ago
Because of your comment I just looked at the source - yup tables. And a spacer gif too https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif
- Mezzie 5y ago
  I think it's old enough to be a retro design choice now.
hooby 5y ago
I don't think any of this is "good" web-design. But my argument never was about the layout or design of Hacker News being "better". What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it.
- EricE 5y ago
  "What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it." Thank you! So many sites have utterly garbage contrast, making content unreadable - it's so annoying. I spam this excellent discussion of color and usability as often as I can: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overview/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... but getting stupid 20 something designers with perfect vision to pay attention is almost impossible :p
oblio 5y ago
And if you try it on mobile, it's mostly crap. Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability. If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.
- danShumway 5y ago
  (Semi) honest question to the commenters below parent, do you all use styluses, or do you just have small fingers, or is there some predictive touch system in the default browser for your devices that isn't present in Firefox? How big are your screens, are you running phablets? Trying to understand how so many people are reaching the conclusion that HN works well on mobile. Maybe 25% of the time I try to upvote or downvote a comment on mobile, I fat-finger the wrong arrow. That shouldn't happen in a mobile interface. I feel like just for the sheer number of comments I'm seeing saying that they don't know what the problem is, there must be something I'm missing. To me it's pretty straightforward, you have to zoom the screen in 20-40% to press any of the buttons or accurately target on any of the links, and when you do that you have to interrupt reading flow because the text doesn't wrap during that zoom. When I turn off the mobile site and request the desktop version it's even worse, so I don't think it's a browser setting. I don't think I have particularly large hands, but the links on the top of the site are still only about 1/3 to 1/4 the size of my pointer finger. What are you all seeing that I'm not? Is there a font-size setting you have checked? This is a pain to use without a precise pointer.
  - anonymoushn 5y ago
    This button clicking issue certainly exists in Android Chrome. It's just that almost every designed-for-mobile website is missing functionality or behaves in unpredictable and terrible ways. Browsing not-designed-for-mobile web sites on mobile and zooming whenever I need to click on something is a big upgrade.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      This is an interesting/illuminating comment, and it makes me wonder if some of this might be a personal bubble thing. I feel like I generally tend to have a better experience on mobile than other people describe, but I'm also running mobile adblockers, and more importantly, I also might just not be visiting all of the same sites as other people? People complain about Reddit on mobile, and I totally agree, Reddit mobile is awful, but it's also a really small part of my life, I generally don't visit Reddit on a phone that often -- so it's easier for me to think about Reddit's mobile site(s) as being some kind of outlier? My experience has been I read a lot of blogs on my phone, I do searches (that go through duckduckgo, which I don't really have a ton of complaints about as a mobile site), I look up quick pieces of information on the fly from random sites, I look at MDN documentation, trying to think what else... I also spent a long time turning off Javascript entirely on my phone browser and I've only very recently started changing that practice (largely because of Gorhill deprecating uMatrix), which probably biases things even more, because a lot of the browsing I do on my phone works without Javascript, and that gets rid of a nontrivial number of annoying behaviors from more aggressive sites, and so I wonder if I'm just not giving the same amount of "credit" for HN not doing the Reddit bullcrap where it pops up a notification asking me to install an app, and that makes it easier to stare at the flaws. If I was doing a lot of Reddit browsing on my phone, I would appreciate HN more on mobile, I will give people that HN is much better on mobile than Reddit.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
danShumway 5y ago
> it just works. Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread buttons don't work without JS). HN is (unironically) a great example of how kind of hacky you can make something and how little you can iterate on it while people still are mostly able to use it for its intended purpose. And (with the exception of maybe its blind accessibility problems) it should be held up as a great example of that. But it's not a good example of "do things simply and they'll just work well." If anything, HN is a great example of why stuff like tables were abandoned. And the HTML isn't even that simple, this must have been a royal pain to build, everything everywhere is another embedded table. It's a weird dig at how bad some major websites have become that people don't see HN's HTML as bloated or convoluted. Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution that makes parsing out and styling threads way harder than it needs to be. Seriously, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make CSS selectors for custom user-styling work on child comments/replies on a site that is supposed to be displaying a comment tree in the DOM tree. There's a one-to-one mapping there, you don't really need a complicated visual slight-of-hand to display this information; just put the comments in the tree. Again, not to get mad at HN; but I think people use it as a positive example in the wrong situations. HN has bad HTML with obvious downsides that would be pretty easy to fix, but it turns out that creating an elegant website and filing off the rough edges is actually a really small part of running a community, and doesn't matter that much in the long run when compared to other things you could be doing to foster that community (like moderation/curation), and that is a very good lesson for tech people to learn from HN. But nobody should praise the HTML on this site, there are much better examples out there on the web of sites that use simple HTML to great effect. ---- > (Applications are a different matter obviously) Much more minor push-back but I actually would love to see more applications embrace the interactive document model even when fully native and fully offline. Not all applications, but a bunch of them. Stuff like calculators, calendars, even bigger applications like database software/image viewers/file browsers, etc... User-accessible stylesheets for applications, user-accessible scraping tools for applications, etc... I think there's a lot of potential for user computing hidden behind a willingness to say, "no, many applications are just text displayed in tree/table form when you think about it, and the app/document divide was always sort of nonsense."

AJ007 5y ago

I would have been horrified if I saw what websites would look like in 2010+ when I first started using the web. The amount of unnecessary garbage and JS added to sites goes well beyond the adtech part. Half or more of sites using frameworks probably should never have used them. A good contrast is Reddit vs hn. Reddit’s current site is basically unusable and sluggish on modern hardware that can you could train ML models with.

moritz 5y ago
Just look at all the overhead of the article‘s website… When I first clicked the link the "website" crashed, so instead of the hot take, all I could read is that "addEventListener is not a function". That tells you all about the current state of affairs (Yes I get that webdevs' personal sites are their playground)
- xemdetia 5y ago
  My favourite recent incarnation if this is when YouTube has its JavaScript go sideways and then it blames the internet being out instead of doing anything productive
- dmitriid 5y ago
  That website also loads 184 KB of Javascript to display a 13 KB static document
  - raytube 5y ago
    It could sit on a shit ton of interpreter too.

ape4 5y ago

Because of your comment I just looked at the source - yup tables. And a spacer gif too https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif

Mezzie 5y ago
I think it's old enough to be a retro design choice now.

hooby 5y ago

I don't think any of this is "good" web-design. But my argument never was about the layout or design of Hacker News being "better". What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it.

EricE 5y ago
"What I meant to argue was, that content is king, and that everything else should serve the actual content - not distract from it." Thank you! So many sites have utterly garbage contrast, making content unreadable - it's so annoying. I spam this excellent discussion of color and usability as often as I can: https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overview/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/design-tokens/color/overvie... but getting stupid 20 something designers with perfect vision to pay attention is almost impossible :p

oblio 5y ago

And if you try it on mobile, it's mostly crap. Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability. If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.

danShumway 5y ago
(Semi) honest question to the commenters below parent, do you all use styluses, or do you just have small fingers, or is there some predictive touch system in the default browser for your devices that isn't present in Firefox? How big are your screens, are you running phablets? Trying to understand how so many people are reaching the conclusion that HN works well on mobile. Maybe 25% of the time I try to upvote or downvote a comment on mobile, I fat-finger the wrong arrow. That shouldn't happen in a mobile interface. I feel like just for the sheer number of comments I'm seeing saying that they don't know what the problem is, there must be something I'm missing. To me it's pretty straightforward, you have to zoom the screen in 20-40% to press any of the buttons or accurately target on any of the links, and when you do that you have to interrupt reading flow because the text doesn't wrap during that zoom. When I turn off the mobile site and request the desktop version it's even worse, so I don't think it's a browser setting. I don't think I have particularly large hands, but the links on the top of the site are still only about 1/3 to 1/4 the size of my pointer finger. What are you all seeing that I'm not? Is there a font-size setting you have checked? This is a pain to use without a precise pointer.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  This button clicking issue certainly exists in Android Chrome. It's just that almost every designed-for-mobile website is missing functionality or behaves in unpredictable and terrible ways. Browsing not-designed-for-mobile web sites on mobile and zooming whenever I need to click on something is a big upgrade.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    This is an interesting/illuminating comment, and it makes me wonder if some of this might be a personal bubble thing. I feel like I generally tend to have a better experience on mobile than other people describe, but I'm also running mobile adblockers, and more importantly, I also might just not be visiting all of the same sites as other people? People complain about Reddit on mobile, and I totally agree, Reddit mobile is awful, but it's also a really small part of my life, I generally don't visit Reddit on a phone that often -- so it's easier for me to think about Reddit's mobile site(s) as being some kind of outlier? My experience has been I read a lot of blogs on my phone, I do searches (that go through duckduckgo, which I don't really have a ton of complaints about as a mobile site), I look up quick pieces of information on the fly from random sites, I look at MDN documentation, trying to think what else... I also spent a long time turning off Javascript entirely on my phone browser and I've only very recently started changing that practice (largely because of Gorhill deprecating uMatrix), which probably biases things even more, because a lot of the browsing I do on my phone works without Javascript, and that gets rid of a nontrivial number of annoying behaviors from more aggressive sites, and so I wonder if I'm just not giving the same amount of "credit" for HN not doing the Reddit bullcrap where it pops up a notification asking me to install an app, and that makes it easier to stare at the flaws. If I was doing a lot of Reddit browsing on my phone, I would appreciate HN more on mobile, I will give people that HN is much better on mobile than Reddit.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

danShumway 5y ago

> it just works. Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread buttons don't work without JS). HN is (unironically) a great example of how kind of hacky you can make something and how little you can iterate on it while people still are mostly able to use it for its intended purpose. And (with the exception of maybe its blind accessibility problems) it should be held up as a great example of that. But it's not a good example of "do things simply and they'll just work well." If anything, HN is a great example of why stuff like tables were abandoned. And the HTML isn't even that simple, this must have been a royal pain to build, everything everywhere is another embedded table. It's a weird dig at how bad some major websites have become that people don't see HN's HTML as bloated or convoluted. Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution that makes parsing out and styling threads way harder than it needs to be. Seriously, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make CSS selectors for custom user-styling work on child comments/replies on a site that is supposed to be displaying a comment tree in the DOM tree. There's a one-to-one mapping there, you don't really need a complicated visual slight-of-hand to display this information; just put the comments in the tree. Again, not to get mad at HN; but I think people use it as a positive example in the wrong situations. HN has bad HTML with obvious downsides that would be pretty easy to fix, but it turns out that creating an elegant website and filing off the rough edges is actually a really small part of running a community, and doesn't matter that much in the long run when compared to other things you could be doing to foster that community (like moderation/curation), and that is a very good lesson for tech people to learn from HN. But nobody should praise the HTML on this site, there are much better examples out there on the web of sites that use simple HTML to great effect. ---- > (Applications are a different matter obviously) Much more minor push-back but I actually would love to see more applications embrace the interactive document model even when fully native and fully offline. Not all applications, but a bunch of them. Stuff like calculators, calendars, even bigger applications like database software/image viewers/file browsers, etc... User-accessible stylesheets for applications, user-accessible scraping tools for applications, etc... I think there's a lot of potential for user computing hidden behind a willingness to say, "no, many applications are just text displayed in tree/table form when you think about it, and the app/document divide was always sort of nonsense."