Consider quoting the text directly though. Making images of text is probably the most inaccessible thing imaginable. Should take less than a hundred lines of CSS to create a believable HN container in a div.
Agreed. I love the concept of this site, but it would load significantly faster and provide better user experience if it utilized text instead. Loading this website took me 9.41 seconds.
Images don't scale, and people using screenreaders would be out of luck, for starters.
While load times for images are worse, this format provides some handy advantages, namely the ability to look through that thread and see more context, read the related article, etc.
This is just "the easy way out". Justifying it otherwise is wrong, in my opinion...
With the exception of companies like FB with millions of users, the priority of creating a css/html rendered version of text to prevent people from having to click through to copy is quite low.
I suppose I'm defending the image as being the more useful of the two "easy way outs" that are likely to be implemented. :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_imple...
A good example is Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing; just look at the Windows dialog in this post: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181016-00/?p=... It's all pure HTML.
The script probably utilized an integration with a screen capture library. I'd imagine someone can write a script to parse html and dig out the comment, but the screen capture script was probably faster to write.
A slower method would be to copy and paste the text by hand...