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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

You do a lot of software development on mobile?

Look up the termux community. There are actually people in third world countries who are learning programming using their phones. I've seen awesome builds which use Android phones as their primary CPU unit and cobble on scavenged monitors and keyboards and mice. It's honestly fucking awesome

How’s that related to the article not being mobile friendly?

It's a reference sheet for a programming language. Like it's clearly designed to be read as you're writing code. I don't understand in which circumstance you'd optimize such a document for mobile use.

You have never read documentation on something you’re not currently writing code with _right_ _now_? Or looked at documentation for something you worked on in the day as you’re on your way home from work?

I opened it on mobile because I was interested in seeing how they differ, even though I’m not using either right now.

Well, I typically don't read a lot on mobile. Screen is too small and you can't block ads, which makes the screen even smaller.

Bet your code always works on your machine too ;)

For what it's worth this is literally how the Julia community deals with feedback.

Well it's not my website. Although the feedback does seem very "this toaster doesn't work when I try to cook soup in it! 1/5"

Not everything needs to cater to mobile.

It seems more like you're saying "It's ok that your toaster doesn't cook pop-tarts, you shouldn't be having those anyway--the sugar's bad for you." Your way of doing things might not be everybody's.

Nothing has to cater to anything but I'm still allowed to be annoyed that I can't read it on mobile.

Ah, it's a post mentioning Julia, and there you are.

What can I say I am a reliable person trying to make sure less people get sucked into Julia without learning of it's downsides. To be fair, the same could be said to you ;).

What's that got to do with mobile phones?

You totally can block ads.

I sometimes read the docs for something while on the train, and in those cases, it’s through the mobile phone.

It happens what when I cannot stop thinking of a problem and really want to find a solution.

We should nurture more accessibility, in this case, mobile compatibility.

For instance, consider someone who has limited access to desktop computers and have to go by with a mobile device. These individuals do exist, and their access is as legitimate as any other.

Mobile compatible websites are strictly worse though. It's why almost all desktop websites are just a hideous jumble of boxes these days.

It's virtually impossible to make a website that is well designed on both desktop and mobile. As long as the affordances of mouse+keyboard and touchscreen are as different as they are, one of the user groups needs will suffer a detrimental compromise.

An empty HTML page works on both. Add some margin and spacing and it keeps working.

After that, what you can do is ruin it, targetting a webpage for a specific screen size.

Right, but if you aren't able to make assumptions about screen size, you can't use for example a table, which is very useful if you want to convey data.

A phone screen just isn't big enough to display tables with more than two or three columns. There's no reason desktop users should need to be crippled in this fashion.

Tables are a very powerful tool for conveying lots of structured data in a way that's useful and intuitive. Avoiding them means losing out on this.

This is the exact problem the website we're discussing is having. You just can't show the relatively small amount of information side-by-side on mobile the way they are trying to. The only solution to it is to make it less intuitive and show them on top of each other in a complete jumble.

I guess you could find the cheat sheet useful on a phone/tablet while you are learning the correspondences.

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