Ask HN: Why is HN Christmas theme using the deprecated font tag? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is HN Christmas theme using the deprecated font tag?

20 pointsdan-silver17 comments

ASK OP: is your life significantly improved if they use a proper standards compliant tag for their festive buttons, or did you just think picking a nerd fight on christmas was just an awesome thing to do?

Excellent question that gets right to the crux of the issue

Because it works.

I like this response.

Pragmatism. I like it.

Its not deprecated. Its... traditional!

And a memorable sunset.

Every day is Christmas when it comes to HN using the font tag.

Today is the first day I've looked at the HTML for Hacker News. I feel like I've stepped into a time machine.

Well, there's a handful of seconds I will never get back.

Now I'm curious about the html op="item" bit.

"op" is Arc's idiom for web request type, so that attribute makes it easy for a scraper to tell what kind of page it's looking at. We added it for a Chrome extension we wrote to help with moderation.

One of these years I want to open-source a stripped-down version of that Chrome extension, or better still make it an optional JS client that people can opt into. It's handy for browsing HN, if you like keyboard shortcuts and don't mind spawning tabs. Anybody know if there's a way for regular JS to spawn tabs, if the user is willing to give it the right permissions?

Goes to show that you can be mobile friendly even with table based layouts! This is one argument against that I heard.

I'd hardly call hacker news "mobile friendly". It's almost a cruel joke how unfriendly it is on mobile devices.

Spelling of time machines, you've also seen the UI.

(which, FYI, is functional though non-pretty, just like the HTML)

I logged in and saw the red and got scared. I thought I was banned for a minute there. But it works.. I like it :)

I thought the same thing!

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