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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

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loloquwowndueo

Lol did this extremely long word mess up HN’s page rendering on narrow (mobile) screens for anyone else ?

View on HN

Haha same! Thought it was a CSS change or something.

And here I was suddenly feeling older, slightly squinting at the page, wondering if the text was always that small.

Sorry guys, didn't expect that to happen.

@dang

it can be fixed by adding `word-break: break-all;`

to the `a` tag for .storylink class.

moderators dont typically monitor the comments for their name (although sometimes they do).

if youd like to help, im sure theyd love to hear from you at hn@ycombinator.com

I might be wrong but I think dang does monitor his name. I have mentioned him a few times and he swings by. Maybe just coincidence. I did email him too.

It was just coincidence :) - but I did just see your email.

Any idea why this post was flagged?

Possibly because it borked the layout, possibly because it's not necessarily a substantive post. This exact type of submission (long unbroken class name from some codebase somewhere) has been made a number of times in the past too—little is new!

Ok, let's try that. Thanks for the suggestion!

All: if it breaks anything, would you please let us know?

(j/k you guys would never not let us know)

works well for me so far!

Most titles now have unnecessary line breaks, in the middle of words. From the front page:

“A world first: Ocean drone captures video f[break]rom inside a hurricane”

“DMV approves Cruise and Waymo for com[break]mercial service in parts of Bay Area”

“Facebook Thrives on Criticism of “Disinfor[break]mation””

(I’m using iOS Safari.)

Ah yes. I knew we'd tried this before! Reverting...

You want break-word, not break-all. The latter breaks short words unnecessarily.

Ok, let's try that and see what it breaks :)

Edit: done now. I can't shake the feeling that we've been through all this before, and that's why I ended up resorting to whitespace tricks in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20352144. But let's wait and see what's broken now...

LGTM on iOS/Safari after clearing cache. Also on Firefox/Linux.

Unfortunately this still makes it a worse experience for "not crazy long" title words. Now it wraps all words if they hit the line break, eg. On the front page right now I see:

  Demo of a WAM Prolog Implementation in Py

  thon

Which makes it harder to read. The previous behavior would write this like:

  Demo of a WAM Prolog Implementation in

  Python

Agree. HN is so much less readable today :(

That's definitely bad but are you sure you're seeing the latest CSS? If it's still broken, I'll revert all of this. Details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28727529.

Ah, very possible it was a caching issue. It is back to good behavior for me now (maybe my cache was just refreshed?)

As someone in big fintech who has to deal with regulated release processes, I would like to tip my hat to "oh that's a godd suggestion from one of our users - let's try that out on our front page as soon as I can commit it".

:-)

If you click “hide” on this story, it’ll be hidden from your home page and sane scrolling on mobile will return!

Oh my god that's hilarious. I had no idea why it was rendering as if it was a desktop screen. lol.

The only thing that I dislike the fast, web version of HN is this desktop layout on mobile, but HN have an API and 100's of mobile clients which work exceptionally well, and a mobile client for HN can be written in hours.

OP of the post here. I am also the developer of HACK which is a HN client for iOS, MacOS and Android:

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

The API for HN is absolute garbage (they admit to it being so too). It's also a read only API and doesn't support actions. My apps rely on scraping the page and then performing actions such as voting, commenting, favouriting, submitting posts etc.

"Absolute garbage"? We wouldn't admit to that!

Read-onlyness was a design choice at the time and still has its place. The main problem with the API is that it's too low-level—you have to do a bunch of work to reconstruct what actually shows up on an HN page. The next version of the HN API will give a simple JSON representation of each HN URL. Initially it will still be read-only though; then we'll see about whether to extend it to writes.

Sorry, didn't mean admitting to "absolute garbage" in a literal way. Mostly referring to statement such as:

> I'm not saying this to defend it - It's not the ideal public API, but it's the one we could release in the time we had. While awkward, it's possible to implement most of HN using it.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

My words may have been a bit too harsh but I still think I have a point. The only thing I could find use of the API was to get the user's details (karma, description, date created etc). Other than that, I ended up relying on scraping.

Unfortunately, unless the JSON api offers write access, it won't be of much use for my app's use cases. Lets just hope the JSON Api isn't going to break anything major in the HTML of the site and there aren't any major re-designs of the site in the pipeline.

(Is it still the case that if you break words in CSS you get even more mad at CSS? I haven't tried in a while)

I feel like this post is a subtle troll

I immediately realised what must have happened and was scrolling down trying to find this news lol.

Yes. They need overflow-x: hidden and text-overflow: ellipsis on the post title div.

Better solution is adding `word-break: break-all;` to the `a` tag for .storylink class.

Yup came to comment the same hah

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