Ask HN: When will Hacker News improve their HTML? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When will Hacker News improve their HTML?

8 points__herson__16 comments

Hello there.

First of all, I found Hacker News a really great and intelligent site, since I knew it is my primary source of news, I spend more time reading articles here than every other site, but I don't really comment to much.

My question is when will Hacker News improve their HTML, I see that there is no doctype definition and comment treads are a bunch of tables and even font tags.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want an interactive site full of ajax requests and infinite scroll or something, I just want to know if there is the possibility to improve a little more the site, I use the Clearly extension for Chrome http://bit.ly/PS9WCJ to read better the comments, but is kind of annoying doing it all the time.

So, what you think about my question?

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When the HTML is the most important thing to work on.

Ok, I know HTML is not the most important thing on the site, but that kind of thoughts only leads to procrastination, because there will always be issues on other stuffs like databases and security, but it would be nice to HN pays a little of atention to this kind of stuff.

I'm not sure if you're wanting the appearance of HN to improve or update the markup to the latest hip-HTML5 tags.

The latter is a waste of time.

Who cares if the html is crufty as long as it works. I use table layouts quite often, and if you look at the source of stackoverflow they use tables too.

What I would like to see are a few functionality tweaks to make HN more useful. The main ones that come to mind are: increasing the timeout before you get an 'unknown or expired link' and optionally emailing you when someone replies to one of your comments.

http://hnnotify.com/

I've been subscribed to hnnotify for >6 mo, and it has worked reliably.

The email notification would be a bit of an antifeature, since it would enable flamewars.

Focusing on the most important problems is not procrastination; in fact it is the opposite of procrastination.

Agreed, it renders fine.

Atleast consider replacing the up/down arrows with unicode ones?

Hopefully after they fix "unknown or expired link" when clicking the More link.

only thing that bothers me

How do you expect this to be fixed exactly? Say, you opened to front page, left it open for few hours and then clicked "More". What do you expect to see there?

the second page, whatever second page there is at this time. this would mean that it might shows me stuff that I read earlier, but isn't that better then getting an error page?

It sometimes does it when you've been writing a long comment and thus had the page open for a while.

Sometimes chrome even nukes the form when I press back :/

I don't understand what this would accomplish, besides giving the validator.w3.org crowd warm fuzzies.

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