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Comment by 4gotunameagain | Hacker News Reader

Not catering to mobile could be construed as a part of the owner's values :)

I certainly think that "mobile first" was a mistake that got everyone addicted, and made kids oblivious about tech.

There's a big difference between "mobile first" and "mobile hostile" (even if the hostility is unintentional). Here, for example, the website is just 10-15 characters too wide on mobile, regardless of orientation. It forces you to scroll left and right constantly just to read the lines. And regardless of orientation actually feels hostile, if I flip my phone to landscape, the font size increases and thus I still can't read the whole line.

I agree that designing for mobile first is annoying for the web in general. But... This is text! Most of the website is text, and it doesn't wrap or resize properly for a small screen.

Here, it's likely just a bug with the window width calculation, not a "mobile first" argument.

If a website is 99% text and it can't be read from every screen size from a phone to an ultrawide monitor... Than it's a bug, not a design choice.

Counter argument: content is mostly consumed on mobile device nowadays, why should I require users scroll horizontally to keep reading and in doing so losing focus of the actual row? “Mobile first” was a more of a methodology, aka start designing from the small device and going up. And this website clearly failed at keep me reading from my mobile device. While I don’t necessarly think “mobile first” was a mistake, I believe today an adaptive layout it’s a more appropriate methodology for the existance of a ton of different devices, screens, ratios and pixel density. Like most websites still sucks on my 32’’ external monitor, it’s not a mobile only problem

Counter-counter argument: A person creating a personal homepage has no obligation to cater to any particular audience. See, for example, jwz.org [NSFW when linked from here, very much on purpose]

> Counter-counter argument: A person creating a personal homepage has no obligation to cater to any particular audience.

That’s irrelevant. Most of the Web users are using mobiles, so if you decide to set a website up, the very basic thing is to ensure it’s readable on mobile. And since plain HTML is already readable on any device by default, it would be quite strange to voluntarily make it unusable on these devices.

The mobile crowd may not be your desired or intended audience though. It's fine to publish a website in Icelandic even if more people could read it in English.

Countee-counter-counter argument:

You are right that nobody is beholden to creating pages that can be viewed on any device. However, it is not unreasonable to say that a person has mismatched interests when they say they care a lot about quality, interoperability and values in general, but then don't care about making the document explaining this viewable on most devices.

Yes, ultimately it's not important. But if you only publish your website using Gopher, at some point you have to accept that you're interested by making cool things rather than the other things mentioned.

All that's needed for a blog site to be mobile-friendly is to just not actively break it. Plain html articles with no css read great on mobile, e.g. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

That website contains

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

So does the OP's website.

"Mobile first" means that the design is accessible on all devices and resolutions. Traditionally websites would be built primarily for large displays, and a separate mobile version would be tacked on, if the authors cared about those users.

In 2023, there's no technical reason websites should be inaccessible on any device. Doing so intentionally is needlessly user-hostile.

A lot of these supposed mobile first designs are barely usable on desktop, no working scroll bar, hamburger menus, etc.

This is a very first-world opinion. Low-end (second hand) smartphones are some of the only available computing devices available for a large part of the world.

> I certainly think that "mobile first" was a mistake

But I think it was very intentional

There is a difference between not being focused on mobile and deliberately making your website unreadable on mobile.

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