This is hilarious! Turns out 18 year old websites were mobile friendly after all
The common definition of mobile device is phone or tablet. The common definition of laptop is computer. These despite the fact that phones and tablets are computers and despite the fact that laptops and even desktops can be moved. It’s pretty easy to find lots of examples of the common definitions. Here’s a good one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device
The question of whether definitions matter when one sub-category or subset is a minority or majority... I’m not sure how to answer that. Why would a definition stop mattering just because something different is a small subset? I must assume that a categorical term includes everything in the category. If you don’t mean everything in the category, then don’t use the term that refers to the category. If you mean phone, then say phone. ?? Right? I’m confused why you would argue anything else.
My further comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328505
1) Forces a particular size/resolution, locking out zoom capabilities
2) Has a floating header with a constant size relative to your device screen, blotting out the same real estate no matter how much you zoom. And, of course, using the same header pixel height for portrait vs landscape, making the latter practically unusable.
Yes, this site is better than 99% of mobile sites out there.
Edit: Some further comments: It's generally better to have a site that obeys the standards and thus plays nice with any client, than one that locks you into the hip designer's meth-addled decision. This site in particular works well with my extensions like VimFX for clicking links from the keyboard.
That's the thing - it shouldn't be necessary. I don't do that on desktop browsers; why should mobile devices be any different? If the site is not legible, I set the desired zoom once and I'm done. There's no need to go back and forth.
Now, I can't do that if the elements stay mismatched on mobile. I have to zoom in and then back when I want to interact with small elements - each time. It gets old when I have to click tiny links or upvote arrows more than a few times. It's jarring and not a good user experience.
> And, of course, using the same header pixel height for portrait vs landscape, making the latter practically unusable.
The floating header issue notwithstanding (I don't like them either), this is exactly why the web designers should tailor their elements to different viewports.
> It's generally better to have a site that obeys the standards
Yes, and that also includes accessibility guidelines. Compatibility with keyboard navigation is one of them, but so is the size and spacing of the controls, links, and buttons.
But I wasn’t comparing to the three or four mobile-optimized sites that satisfy all that. I was referring to the more typical millions that don’t.
And yes, given how bad they are, I’d much rather have suboptimal design that I can recover from with a pinch or a double tap than one I can’t.
What would you cite as an example of a mobile site that is more usable than this one?
This one being the Italian one from the submission or the Hacker News itself? I'm assuming the Italian one. Off the top of my head, sites with good mobile version and similar structure (lots of text and links) are Wikipedia and The Guardian. One tiny nitpick are tables with multiple columns in Wikipedia articles. This is a common struggle and I haven't found an elegant way of showing data-dense tables on mobile screens.
But other than that, all the elements on both of these sites are big enough, I don't have to zoom in, I don't have to scroll sideways, there are no floating elements, and they have distinctive style. They even work well with a dark mode add-on on Mobile Firefox.
I checked out Guardian.co.uk (assuming that's what you meant), and yes, it is a pretty well designed site that works great on and doesn't seem to even distinguish mobile vs desktop users. But still, this is about the only mobile site I couldn't find anything wrong with. This isn't the typical 99% site.
All you needed to do then, and today, is make sure your HTML is valid and that you don't break things on purpose ("this site optimized for MSIE1.0" type of stuff) and your site will forever be mobile and any-other-html-rendering device friendly.
This is not one of those.