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Comment by omegote | Hacker News Reader

9 years ago, using tables for layout was already considered a bad practice. Yet here we are...

9 years ago, separation of presentation and content was already considered a good practice. Yet here we are with application frameworks and component-based designs that throw it all out the window...

To expect any consistent design principles on a development medium as ad-hoc and devoid of principles as the web, is wishful thinking.

Things evolve. Something being considered a good practice is not a necessary a good practice when we learn more information.

HN isn't about using good practices. It's about getting to the heart of the matter. Content is content, who cares how it's displayed, for better or worse. But people keep showing up. So it must be working just fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

One could say that about pretty much any website.

But it is broke, and needs fixed. The site is nigh unusable on a mobile browser, for instance.

What is broken?

I use mobile devices for 99% of my Hacker News activity.

Here, that’s what I see: http://i.imgur.com/cwx6Wyk.png

And sometimes it just doesn’t limit the size at all, and I can scroll 5 screen widths for every single sentence back and forth.

Without that broken upvote button I couldn't even tell who's replying to who. http://i.imgur.com/yHki0zO.png

Yeah, the table layout definitely sucks. Doesn’t work in many browsers, horrible for writing addons...

Agreed. I've been using this on my phone: http://hackerwebapp.com/

Works pretty well.

Thanks for this.

I'm using the web version and it is so much better than the mobile changes that have just been rolled out.

As it stood my reading of HN was about to decrease exponentially with this new flat comment style. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531710

But I'll be using http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/#/ now.

If it would just be possible to comment...

It's hard to maintain or add new features if good design/development practices aren't followed.

You sound like my managers.

I'm not saying it's the right thing. I'm just saying this is the reasoning I hear for this kind of thing most often.

Can you imagine how hard it was to write a browser addon that allows collapsing a specific subthread of comments?

I have to calculate the indent of a comment based on the width of an image in the table layout!

Instead of nested tags for comments like

    <comment>
      <text>
      <list-of-comment>
       <comment>
         ...
       </comment>
       <comment>
         ...
       </comment>
      </list-of-comment>
    </comment>

these people have all comments on main level, just indented with image width!

    <tr><td><image src="" width="40"></td><td>Text</td></tr>
    <tr><td><image src="" width="60"></td><td>Text</td></tr>
    <tr><td><image src="" width="60"></td><td>Text</td></tr>
    <tr><td><image src="" width="20"></td><td>Text</td></tr>

In other words, it's very easy? I've made the equivalent of a browser addon for HN before, the only source of difficulty was when the markup changed.

In other words, it’s quite annoying. Especially when you want to do nested styling.

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