Oh my goodness. It’s worse than you probably think. I built a HN dark mode web extension (you can grab it on my GH under the same handle if you want) because it’s been asked for so many times... And the weird hacks I had to do (even basing it off of dang’s invitation to solve it with HN’s base stylesheet) were so unusual that I didn’t feel comfortable promoting it here or anywhere.

There’s not just weird 90s style table layout/spacer gifs, there’s also just random font tags and inline color attributes for important (eg branding) elements. Every downvote greying is inline color attributes.

I’d originally planned on a companion stylesheet for Algolia search and it was so different I just bailed.

Edit: honestly given the forum, I wish they’d open source some portion of HN to allow improvement. I really want a better mobile view, which is easily achievable with CSS without using the API and hosting another domain. If there’s so little interest in UX improvement effort this is something we could pick up the slack on.

Never meet your heroes.

I'd love to hear the justification (no pun intended) for this.

Yeah, TIL. I've looked at the DOM before, but I saw multiple layers of tables and just assumed it was tables all the way down.

I thought the same, no way :) But, it makes a point. If nobody notices any side-effects of a bad design, is it still a bad design?

The text-browser point made by the OP is the first that ran into this however most text browsers don't render the current 'best practice' (using CSS classes with margins) correctly either.

Stand horrified! What is wrong with tables?