Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ygor | Hacker News Reader

"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX"

SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it.

And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?

The same people who say SO has "a poor UX" are the same people who say that Reddit has "a poor UX". They're conflating gradients, rounded rectangles and text shadows with a user's experience of the site.

Not so. As I commented earlier[1], SO's data/ink ratio sucks compared to YC.

1- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305304

the use case is rather different, though: Hacker News is a list of articles other people have written with discussion and commentary. Stack Overflow is a list of questions from your peers with potential answers. (Also, that's a really old screenshot)

Quite the opposite. I find SO's interface very busy, and wish it was a little simpler, closer to Reddit. Ultimately it's the community that makes it, and the UX is fairly irrelevant.

I want to make this Blue Oranges 35 thing real. Here's a start:

Level 0 (basic):

   • XHR, not ajax
   • No anchoring namespaces (no /r/ or /b/, just have users/spaces at the root.)
   • No file extensions in URLs (no .html, .cgi, .aspx, ...)
   • All production HTML/JS/CSS has newlines stripped to 32k characters per line.
   • gzip for all html, js, css, json, ...
   • Proper password storage
   • Not exploitable by injection
   • No XSS problems
   • ...

Level 1 (extended):

   Level 0 +
   • Proper expires headers
   • Proper CDN usage
   • All authenticated transactions over https
   • All JS/CSS minified but with full versions readily accessible.
   • ...

Level 2 (optimal):

   Level 1 +
   • All pages generate in under 300ms
   • All images properly sized/crushed
   • ...

Why are 64K-long lines considered a good thing?

And, when the site has minified the JS/CSS, how would full versions be readily accessible?

A site that is happy with others learning from their own good practices won't want to do things that have the effect of obfuscating their resources, if the savings are very small. So other than the 'levels', you might want to split your benchmarks on whether collateral obfuscation is considered positive/neutral or negative.

Oh, I misremembered the line length. It's 32k from max-line-len option at https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS

As for having min and non-min, I like to have "file.compressed.js" and "file.js" available. We shouldn't shut off all avenues of learning for the sake of expediency.

Clearly, StackOverflow needs more colour gradients.

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