Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load).

Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.

(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)

100k prize announcement for a competition right up a HN writer's alley and the top discussion on it is how the announcement page doesn't load correctly on a browser with half the features disabled. We are truly a special group :D.

It’s currently at +39. I did not expect that! I expected it to settle at the bottom like something that settles at the bottom—I dunno, detritus, lees, Titanic, something like that.

Still, I’ll take the opportunity to advocate for turning off fonts. Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced settings → Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been using the web so for 6½ years and it makes it so much better.

+40 I hate websites that do stupid stuff. My latest pet peeve is Qwen's blog, when I pinch to zoom, to be able to read their tiny graphs, there is a black bar that progressively covers the entire page.

It probably just literally doesn't work for most people. If you click through, see a broken page, and see that the top comment thinks the way in which it's broken is interesting, that'll probably be more interesting to engage with than the contents of the page.

From the code, it looks like it’s only broken if you have a browser more than about two and a half years old, JavaScript disabled, or fonts disabled. Even on HN, I would expect that to be under 5% of viewers, surely under 10%, and people that turn off JS are used to the occasional page not working (though it’s happily less common than it was five years ago).

I have a fully functional, updated Chrome derivative with all the features enabled, and they went out of their way to dynamically load a

  Update your browser to access this website

message as the only visible content rather than test features (which they're clearly doing to GP, so how much work would it be to properly use that feature testing as the main tool for compatability checking) or just letting the browser try to load it -- displaying one of those big-tech "update your browser now" nag messages if they really feel the need to be annoying.

That message is triggered by checking for support of the CSS light-dark() function and :has() selector:

  window.CSS&&CSS.supports&&CSS.supports('color','light-dark(#000, #fff)')&&CSS.supports('selector(:has(a))')

Are you sure your browser is fully functional and updated? Chromium shipped the last part of that incantation two and a half years ago.

We should not accept defeat when it comes to accessibility, graceful degradation and adherence to standards.

This is what happens when the world has a gpu per person

I circumvented it with this one-liner (credit to DSV4 0731, who kindly read the minified scripts for me). I got it to work by injecting it at the console after a refresh, and before the scripts finished loading (there's probably more robust ways but I'm lazy and this does work).

    FontFace.prototype.load = function() { return Promise.resolve(this); };

Anyway; those are my two cents.

Sorry, we’ll fix!

This should be a pretty simple 1-line CSS fix, just default to standard system fonts if the "dg" font isn't available.

No, it’s loading the font in JS for some reason (rather than a regular @font-face) and going out of its way to break the page if that fails, rather than ignoring it as it should. `font-family: dg` is fine, it’ll fall back to the user’s default font (which will typically be serif).

Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js

Privacy Badger didn't show any trackers.

Font-based fingerprinting is a thing too

>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not to break. @dang or whoever - has anyone ever considered adding some kind of 'meta' discussion area to each topic? This would provide a place for people to commiserate / troubleshoot without diluting the main discussion? As we saw here, the discussions can sometimes be plenty productive (e.g. the author seeing and reacting to the criticism, paywall workarounds, etc.), it's just not what people interested in the actual subject want to read. And conversely, if it was moved into a special meta annex, people with a problem or a gripe would know right where to look.

The only reason I commented this was because the specific breakage was novel. And it’s rare for this specific type of comment to rank highly. Apparently this one is unusually interesting to others, or something? Beats me.

Sure, the specifics of this issue are intriguing on their own terms to the website nerds, but “there exists a problem with display of the website” surely rates as a tangential annoyance.

It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully moderate these meta comments away because there’s always going to be new problems and corresponding urges to discuss them. Nor do I think we really want to, when it comes down to it. They’re often useful, or at least cathartic.

…but. They DO make for dreadful reading if you actually came to read about the article itself. Thus my idea to add a wiki-style meta section. Then you get best of both worlds.

Fortunately it’s easy to collapse the tree. And the mods do often override trees like this to default to collapsed.

I think you deserve a rule bending or two every once in a while, as a fine HN citizen in good standing. They're not even linked prominently, so the fact that they even exist for a site that doesn't justify moderation actions feels a bit like Eternal September Keyfabe

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