Reddit's css file is 3559 lines long. HN's is 41. | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's css file is 3559 lines long. HN's is 41.

reddit.com

7 pointsfmgg9 comments

http://ycombinator.com/news.css

Hacker News uses tables for layout vs CSS at Reddit. And of course, Hacker News isn't exactly styled.

More interestingly: reddit doesn't minify their CSS. Easy 2kb savings, even with gzipping (I used YUI to minify):

   78K reddit.css
   68K reddit.min.css
   16K reddit.css.gz
   14K reddit.min.css.gz

It's not very styled, but you can bet nobody spent days and days tweaking the css to get the layout to work with broken browsers (e.g. ie6)

Is there a thesis here? I have no idea what you're trying to tell us. Hacker News isn't exactly Reddit...what are you comparing?

I'm not trying to give a "thesis", but I think it's interesting to compare the two. I realize there is much more to reddit, but 86 times more? And both sites pride themselves on a primarily functional design, but HN accomplishes this (better, in my opinion) in 41 lines of css. Remarkable.

I'd counter that Reddit has grown over time, has a much wider readership, and probably cares about off-the-wall browsers and configurations more than Hacker News does. Reddit also looks pretty good on my iPhone, and HN does not.

What I don't get is HN's fascination with comparisons to Reddit, and your post is going to suffer from that.

Even though there is a lot more to Reddit than Hacker News it is still interesting to see the difference.

There's a lot more to Reddit than HN.

http://ycombinator.com/news.css

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