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Comment by 1over137 | Hacker News Reader

This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?

Because browsers, especially phone browsers, are broken.

A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.

Firefox reader mode will probably render it OK.

Chrome reader mode works fine too

It's missing

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

Not sure why we need to add that but mobile sites look like ass without it.

(Or more precisely, not sure why "make the site look like ass" was chosen as the default, and making it look good is opt-in!)

Because it's assumed that it's for desktop. The first iPhone demo had (if I recall correctly) the browser zoom into the NYT website. Which can work well.

I'd rather this than what I often see nowadays: sites with fixed width tables that overflow out of the mobile viewport with no way to view the info.

The site is using an obsolete version of XHTML. So it's probably using out of date other things, too, and not targeting phones.

EDIT: I just checked. There are 77 HTML errors and warnings alone.

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