Let's not treat HTML tables as being some super special ability.
If HN were implemented exactly the same but with flexbox or grid for layout, it would be objectively better with no drawbacks I can think of.
Trying to understand how so many people are reaching the conclusion that HN works well on mobile. Maybe 25% of the time I try to upvote or downvote a comment on mobile, I fat-finger the wrong arrow. That shouldn't happen in a mobile interface.
I feel like just for the sheer number of comments I'm seeing saying that they don't know what the problem is, there must be something I'm missing. To me it's pretty straightforward, you have to zoom the screen in 20-40% to press any of the buttons or accurately target on any of the links, and when you do that you have to interrupt reading flow because the text doesn't wrap during that zoom.
When I turn off the mobile site and request the desktop version it's even worse, so I don't think it's a browser setting. I don't think I have particularly large hands, but the links on the top of the site are still only about 1/3 to 1/4 the size of my pointer finger.
What are you all seeing that I'm not? Is there a font-size setting you have checked? This is a pain to use without a precise pointer.
People complain about Reddit on mobile, and I totally agree, Reddit mobile is awful, but it's also a really small part of my life, I generally don't visit Reddit on a phone that often -- so it's easier for me to think about Reddit's mobile site(s) as being some kind of outlier?
My experience has been I read a lot of blogs on my phone, I do searches (that go through duckduckgo, which I don't really have a ton of complaints about as a mobile site), I look up quick pieces of information on the fly from random sites, I look at MDN documentation, trying to think what else...
I also spent a long time turning off Javascript entirely on my phone browser and I've only very recently started changing that practice (largely because of Gorhill deprecating uMatrix), which probably biases things even more, because a lot of the browsing I do on my phone works without Javascript, and that gets rid of a nontrivial number of annoying behaviors from more aggressive sites, and so I wonder if I'm just not giving the same amount of "credit" for HN not doing the Reddit bullcrap where it pops up a notification asking me to install an app, and that makes it easier to stare at the flaws.
If I was doing a lot of Reddit browsing on my phone, I would appreciate HN more on mobile, I will give people that HN is much better on mobile than Reddit.
> no drawbacks
Would it be slower or use more CPU or memory to render?
With flexbox layout, probably (?), but likely imperceptibly (don't quote me on that, I haven't actually done the math to check if the benefits from decreased DOM elements would outweigh the increased cost of flexbox, maybe it would get faster just by virtue of shipping less HTML).
That being said, GP is being kind of extravagant, there is arguably nothing on HN that requires tables or flexbox. I always felt like inline spans and maybe a few floats/margin:autos for stuff like headers/menus would probably handle the majority of the layout.
This is part of my criticism of "HN picked the simple answer" takes; even if you go back over a decade and even if you take flexbox off the table, tables weren't really the simplest answer after CSS `margin:auto` was invented. This really isn't a website with columns of data, it almost doesn't need any layout tool at all.
I think the, "now flexbox exists so we can do it correctly" takes are also wrong in their own way; HN is a single-column reading experience with very simple menus, why bring flexbox into this? I always try to temper this claim because I haven't technically ever sat down and built a pixel-perfect replica using normal HTML, I don't technically know there's nothing that wouldn't require modern CSS. But I have poked around at different pages of the site and messed around with resolutions, and I've never seen a situation on the site that I felt required all of that extra HTML and complexity.
I almost wonder if the point of the embedded font tags and image spacers and crud is that site is trying to make it sort of render the same even with CSS turned off. But if so, that's bad practice and the site should stop doing that. Anyone who's turning off CSS is doing that for a reason and the site should just respect that and ship them the pure content.
Quotes don't sidescroll to infinity for you?
I could go on and on...
It's okish, but it's no pinnacle for usability, that's for sure.