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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine hn owes a lot of success to its simplicity.

I was always confused by slashdot's filters and the threads in almost every other forum, with Post #18 replying to Post #7 and Post #27 replying to Post #3, but only 10 posts visible per page. Busy people don't have the time to wade through stuff like that, so all you're left with are the trolls.

hn's nested threads built with <table> are so simple that they're brilliant. No horizontal scrolling, no flipping between pages, just click "reply" and you're good to go.

I have no idea how much time and effort pg puts into hn, but I'm sure it's nontrivial. Something as good as hn doesn't get that way purely organically. Also, I would guess that more of his energy goes into the software, not the site's output. Why deal with an issue once when you can build something that will deal with it forever?

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: thank you pg!

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hn's nested threads built with <table> are so simple that they're brilliant. No horizontal scrolling, no flipping between pages, just click "reply" and you're good to go.

I don't think <table>s should get undue praise. With <div>s, the code would be easier to read mechanically (for manipulation with Greasemonkey, say) and even though there'd be a little more CSS, the page weight might be reduced a little (I'd have to make a mockup to be sure ;-))

^^ THIS. I love it when sites use DIVs because it makes much much easier to chop them up and display them the way I want to by using Stylish or GreaseMonkey. The browser is a customizable viewer...your stylesheet is just a suggestion.

If you use Selector Gadget - http://www.selectorgadget.com/ - it's possible to divine pretty horrible and complex CSS and XPath matches for things on Hacker News but.. they're far from entirely reliable. A lot of ugly TABLE TD:nth-child(5) stuff..

I disagree. Tables are still the most reliable way to display content under nearly all circumstances (maybe less so on mobiles, but definitely on the desktop). They've been stable for years and years. I went through the hardcore standards phase where I thought it would be the death of my soul if I ever went back to using tables for layout, but then I read a great article (wish I had the link) that struck a chord with me. It said you don't have to avoid tables for certain small situations where it can save you a ton of time and a few headaches. I would never suggest doing a whole layout in tables, but I think the comments on HN are a good example of something that would have been a pain in the ass to get right across all browsers. Just use tables for layout if it actually makes sense and even then, ever so sparingly.

Yeah this could quickly devolve into a flame about divs vs tables. But divs I always saw as a step backwards in one aspect: programmer ease of use. In divs you have to spend time thinking about "float drop", doing math in your head, and getting all the columns to have the same height - things which "just work" in tables. It still surprises me sometimes how quickly they were adopted.

But divs I always saw as a step backwards in one aspect: programmer ease of use.

It's always a lot easier at first to overlook structure in your app/code/whatever. It's when you or others come to work with your code or extend it in some way (with Greasemonkey, say) that all the extra work comes along.

If you have to "spend time thinking about" writing tests, it takes longer to build the prototype of your software but.. that's not a particularly good rationale for not using tests (though it is still a rationale, of course). Same goes for semantic markup in my book.

Tables are still the most reliable way to display content under nearly all circumstances (maybe less so on mobiles, but definitely on the desktop).

I don't think that's been true for several years.

Internet Explorer pretty much guarantees that my statement is true.

Your statement pretty much guarantees that I wouldn't want you writing my view layer.

Since you specialize in HTML5, why would you need me to write your view layer?

Since you would shrink from using CSS to mark up the comments on this site (child's play), I can't think of a reason.

I didn't say that I would, actually. I was defending the decision made by the author of this site. I've been defending practicality over spending a lot of one's time trying to get certain kinds of layout elements working in all browsers across the board. If you cannot appreciate that then let's just agree to disagree.

To anyone that is interested, I found that article I was talking about. http://www.zurb.com/article/206/tables-not-as-evil-as-you-th...

>. It said you don't have to avoid tables for certain small situations where it can save you a ton of time and a few headaches.

I am not a front end developer, but I agree to the philosophy to an extent in terms of generic software development.

As software developers, our job is not to thrive for the perfect solution, but writing maintainable, code that we ship. I understand that many people (probably not HN users) take "real artists ship", as an excuse to put ugly unmanageable "hack", which I am not supporting either (infact I think I would be one of the last guys to compromise of code quality), but truth of the matter is, we live in an non-ideal-finite-time-full-of-deadline world, and as every thing has a cost-to-benefit ratio (short and long term). I think as software developers, its a part of out job to judge that cost-to-benefit ratio and if the cost starts to become much for the benefit offered, its time to rethink about software puritanism.

<div>'s might make sense from a purist's point of view or even from a experienced web dev's point of view. But I think, hn's changes have been based on pragmatism. So tables could be one of that. I remember pg saying he left out search feature saying google does a good job of that.

Don't unordered lists make more sense than divs in this case?

dl might make more sense here---meta information about the post in a dt and the post itself in a dd.

Although I don't think a post would be considered the term and the responses the definition.

I actually think the best way to display these types of comments is with nested UL/LI's. It makes it really easy to call a recursive function to write out the comments then adjust the indentation with CSS. For my mobile HN site, I do just that. From there, it was trivial to add in the ability to collapse and expand comments. For example, view this page through my reader (It's meant for mobile phones):

http://toadjaw.com/hn/comments/1398250

Hacker News is the craigslist of Social News sites.

But I hate using craigslist. I only use it because I have to.

What do you hate about it?

I hate apartment search. It's so so painful. Their data model is all wrong.

Location is the most important thing about an apartment in my opinion. That should be the primary method by which you search. And they've tried, but you end up searching within these broad "neighborhoods" in the bigger US cities. And a lot of people mischaracterize their apartment's location in order to make it seem nicer or whatever.

Why is craigslist wasting my time? Require posters to put in the actual address or at least an intersection for their apartment. Then show me the postings on a map. Something like hotpads.com works really well for me, but they don't have the volume that craigslist does, so I'm stuck.

Check out padmapper.com does a nice maps mashup of craigslist plus other sources. May still not work if the data in your city is too poor, but works great for me.

Heh thanks for the plug. And to grandparent, PadMapper basically strips away all the listings which don't have an address, which incidentally gets rid of a lot of the spam.

But I hate using craigslist. I only use it because I have to.

Now, Thats some value creation.

hn owes a lot of it's success to it's small audience. simply put, this site would go down in flames fast if it attracted a larger crowd. all of the complex facilities of a site like digg or slashdot come from trying bubble up relevant content to a wide audience

That nails it exactly, when slashdot and digg were small they felt just like HN does today (well, maybe digg not, but reddit certainly did). Digg always was more mainstream oriented.

The biggest turn-off for me on digg is not so much the complexity of the site but the level of the discussion.

To be fair, it's possible to build a fairly good community in a smaller subreddit. The larger ones have those problems, but it seems like most small sized subreddits actually work out pretty well.

Still, I find myself gradually spending more and more time here and less and less time and reddit. I think if I didn't mod a few subreddits there, I'd pretty much have solely switched to HN.

That's probably true, and in fact underscores the point even further, smaller == better.

I'd say, small is good. Because smaller might lead to too small.

I don't know I still find it a bit confusing. Read a thread and come back to it a few hours latter. The vote rearranging makes it feel like an entirely new thread with some deja vu thrown in especially when people reply at the wrong level either to defeat reply aging or just by mistake.

I like the simple layout, but sometimes I wish I could minimize threads (kinda like how Reddit does it)

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