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Comment by dchest | Hacker News Reader

I wish people stopped complaining on HN that linked websites don't work on their iPads, and instead sent bug reports to Apple or authors of the websites.

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It's not a bug, it's intentional (and thus obnoxious):

OK, but why not ask the author to fix this?

Because it's ironic that he's being a stickler for standards when his own site is broken.

There is nothing ironic in the fact that people cannot afford to test their websites on every single device Apple releases. FYI, I just opened that website on my iPhone and it works great. Perhaps, the viewport meta tag was added here with iPhone in mind, before iPad was released.

Edit: indeed, this is a bug: there are different CSS styles for devices with < 480px screen width and > 480px (via @media CSS rules). Desktop browsers pick the latter style and ignore "viewport" meta tag. iPhone picks the former style and takes into account viewport. iPad picks the desktop style and takes into account viewport, which disables zoom (intended for the iPhone style version).

Now that I debugged the problem, can we instead report bugs to website designers instead of commenting here on HN?

Ah, okay, I got the irony with the non-standard Apple's meta tag :) Took me 18 hours.

Yes, the problem is that iPhone’s HTML layout engine breaks the page when you rotate the phone, then breaks it further when you rotate it back to where you were. I put the viewport tag in to solve the iPhone, but then the iPad came out and there’s no way to have a different viewport for an iPhone / iPad. Blame Apple, I’m still trying to find a working solution.

Well, for that matter HN has a fixed minimum width defined which makes it unable to display properly on an iPad (ie. without scrolling back and forth to read comments).

That's odd. I never have to horizontally scroll comments in my Android browser.

Well... Since we are reporting bugs, the Nook browser is also unable to properly show HN without horizontal scrolling.

That and logging in, but this one I suspect is a browser problem.

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