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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Anybody care to comment on whether this is intended to be ironic? It replaces a clear, concise table layout with a somewhat more verbose CSS version for seemingly no reason.

Had the author attacked the threaded comment page (which might actually benefit from using nested lists) rather than the tabular submissions page, I might be less confused.

As it stands though, I find I'm confronted with the least convincing attack on tables I've seen in a while (and I tend to put myself in the "CSS over tables" camp normally).

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> It replaces a clear, concise table layout with a somewhat more verbose CSS version for seemingly no reason.

That's interesting that you claim it is more verbose. The author measured the before-and-after and came up with these numbers:

> Since he (and so many others) are all about the numbers, how's this for a number:

> Original HN website: 26087 characters long.

> My rewrite: 3587 characters long.

> That is some massive savings. This will not only be lighter down the wire, but the browser will render it faster because it has less to do.

Where is your evidence that the table layout is clear and concise, and where is your evidence that using CSS makes it more verbose? It looks exactly opposite to me.

Was that 3587 characters for the three items displayed on the coderwall version, as opposed to the 30 items on the HN page?

I sure hope not, that would be pretty misleading.

CSS would allow HN to have a layout that adapted itself to smaller screen sized much better. I find it horrible to open HN on my phone or even tablet.

What kind of phone or tablet? It works great on my iPhone / iPad, better than most mobile sites. I know that the Android browsers zoom differently than Safari on iOS, maybe that's the difference?

You can't vote (you have to zoom 3x or you'd accidentally down-vote a poor guy), and the front page is not readable in portrait mode, and only barely legible in landscape mode. Nested comments (more than 4 levels deep) are usually unreadable.

One rather handy feature of Chrome on Android is showing a small, zoomed window of where you click when there are a few links together; allowing you to select the correct link. I also assume this feature is present on the iOS version of Chrome.

"Great"? Are we looking at the same site? It looks lke this on my iPhone .. https://moo.mx/grabs/31902728.png

Google "Responsive Web Design." you shouldn't have to pinch your zoom your way into every website. HN has a poor mobile experience.

Comment pages look okay on your iphone when there is six or seven levels of replies? I switch to iheckernews.com if I want to read a long comment thread on the iphone.

Substantially smaller transfer size is certainly a valid reason. I don't know how accurate his numbers are though.

I'm not sure why refactoring a table layout (an old html layout hack) into something more semantically correct and accessible is considered an "attack".

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