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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

And when I'm logged out, don't hide the "Sign In" button from me!

Digital Ocean is guilty of this. If you're on a phone, or a tablet, or any browser with a window narrower than about 700px, the page is so obsessed with selling Digital Ocean that in order for an existing customer to use an account you've already paid for, you have to click the hamburger menu, and then scroll... scroll... scroll... all the way down to the bottom of 75 options to find a sign-in button.

For a company that brands itself as being tech-forward and people-friendly, Digital Ocean should know better.

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I love Digital Ocean, but this annoys me so much. If anyone from DO sees this, please fix this crap!

We need an extension in the meantime.

This is bad at even at 1000px. That’s 1/3rd of an xdr pro display and my most common window width now.

uBlock Origin, right-click, "Block element".

I thought it was just an ad blocker, but now I realize it's a "whatever DOM element I dislike" blocker.

This works unless the css classes or HTML structure change frequently.

I think e.g. Facebook does that and I’ve been unable to block annoying elements there.

Does anyone know how to make it work in that scenario?

Even worse with random CSS class names and random ids on many websites. Some of the JS dev crowd think it to be a good idea to have class names random generated. I consider it to be a kind of dark pattern by now.

Some CSS-in-JS libraries will create a hash of the underlying CSS and use that as the class name. So not quite random, and should remain consistent if the underlying CSS hasn't changed.

Yeah it's terrible. The JS framework we use hijacks the ID property with some internal ID which is quite annoying in some cases.

With DO, I've noticed that you can enter login credentials into the sign up screen and it works to authenticate you if you have an existing account.

How hard would it be for DO to change the sign up button to 'Sign up/Login'? Seems like an utterly trivial change to make for something that's completely possible, but totally hidden, while the 'visible' solution is extremely aggravating.

That's a textbook example of poor UI.

I've seen a lot of rhetoric, even on HN, that frontend/webdev is "not that hard", that frontend/webdev engineers are doing busy work to justify their jobs, etc. And then people with this mentality go to their jobs, they subconsciously or overtly promote these views in their workplaces, people who are good at this stuff try to avoid toxic workplaces that undervalue them rhetorically or with actual compensation, and then you wind up with "easily" fixable things like this and the toxic people blame the frontend engineers who are willing to stay in environments like this.

A phone with less than 700px width in 2020? The sites I work with have small screens at around 1000-1200 px width. 700 is more like a wap feature phone..

A phone with less than 700px width in 2020?

On a mobile device, web display pixels (logical pixels) are not the same as physical pixels.

An iPhone SE's logical width is 320px.

An iPhone 8 is 375px.

An iPhone 8 Plus is 414 px.

An iPad is 768px.

700 is more like a wap feature phone

WAP phones were closer to 180px. I know because I built local WAP news and weather sites for them. Squeezing color radar maps into 180px was... interesting.

> An iPhone SE's logical width is 320px.

I always forget about this one. Thanks for ruining my afternoon.

I love my iPhone SE since I can easily use it one-handed without worrying about dropping a $1,000 electronic device

It's a great phone. I'm just building a thing that needs to support it, and I was treating 380px as the lower end of things.

I did too, but with battery health at 91% I'd get maybe an hour of heavy use (and 12hr of light use) before having to charge it

Even on desktop I always have two windows open side-by-side. Normally it's VS Code and Chrome, so I can reference documentation while coding, or take Markdown notes while reading. Most websites seem not to be designed for this use case, which is a shame since the solution is usually setting min-width to a smaller value.

Multi-display or a huge single display and a cooperate window manager is a real game changer for productivity... unless of course "desktop" actually means a laptop used away from a desk.

iPhone SE came out in 2016 and has a resolution of 640x1136. I still use it.

Css width is probably 320px on that too. Css pixels are not screen pixels.

Can anyone explain this? Why are these pixels not the same as physical pixels, like I asume to be on a computer screen?

Because after a short lived attempt to educate uninterested web developers about px vs em vs.... browsers decided the easiest way forward was to give up and lie.

https://webplatform.github.io/docs/tutorials/understanding-c...?

No, I meant: Explain why pixels on smart phones are not physical pixels, as I would expect them to be. Why does a phone need to act differently, kind of dishonest about its pixels?

> Explain why pixels on smart phones are not physical pixels, as I would expect them to be. Why does a phone need to act differently, kind of dishonest about its pixels?

The phone is not acting differently. The phone is acting according to the specification, which is that a pixel is 1/96th of an inch. This happens on all devices, not just phones.

From the spec:

> The absolute length units are fixed in relation to each other and anchored to some physical measurement. They are mainly useful when the output environment is known. The absolute units consist of the physical units (in, cm, mm, pt, pc, Q) and the visual angle unit (px):

> 1in = 2.54cm = 96px

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSS_pixel

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values-3/#absolute-lengths

Because it ensures a page is useable on a mobile phone, even if the author didn’t take mobile into account: the screen can accommodate for about as much information as a regular 320px computer screen. If you try to use every pixel as you would on a regular screen it would be illegible for most users.

The newer generation of the SE came out this year (2020) and works great too

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