Ask PG: Why not use the ▲ unicode character instead of a gif on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Why not use the ▲ unicode character instead of a gif on HN?

25 pointsthomasfl22 comments

When you get to 500 karma, you get a ▼ immediately below the up arrow. Making a decent layout for both, even using the small arrow equivalents (▴ and ▾) would be pretty tricky in text as it'd need to be a block element rather than the specifically sized div with background image trick that's used now.

Interestingly (if you're a massive web nerd) is that the image asset request sets a no-cache header. Almost certainly just a default setting that's been overlooked but it could be a tracking image in disguise! :)

Yes, but the gif looks awful if you zoom in.

I didn't know about the downvote arrow. Makes me sad to see that even if my Hacker News account is almost 7 year old, I only got 312 karma points. :-(

That's ok, you make me feel better for when my account gets to almost 7 years old =)

The cache issue is actually visible sometimes on very shitty wifi. That made me check it once, because it showed the images a few seconds later than the page. Which should never happen for a page you visit daily.

False: when you get > 500 (not >= 500).

How about making the downvote arrow invisible by giving it the same colour as the background of HN, and taking away the cursor via CSS.

That way you technically always have the same HTML though the user can't see the arrow or use it.

I'm on exactly 500 karma right now, and I don't see any downvote arrows. Has the number changed?

I wish theu up and down were not so close together.

Fear of accidental downvoting prevents some people from upvoting. That's sub optimal.

This has gotten worse for me with Safari on OS X Mavericks. Sometimes I click on the up arrow and OS X decides to scroll some 15px down, leaving me to wonder if I actually hit up or down.

PG doesn't have time. Others do, so I introduce to you HN Special. http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/

P.S. It has unicode arrows.

I love it. Very useful.

Beautiful! I've started using it now to post comments.

Wonderful unicode arrows!

That's pretty great. Would like to have keyboard navigation though. j and k for up and down on post selection and Enter to open article, (maybe "c" for comments)

I'm more wondering why they use css* to rotate the image, instead of just using a sprite with both triangles and clipping.

Granted, on a site as simple as HN this makes no difference at all. But I think there is an overall trend to push more work onto the client, which kinda makes sense since they have more and more CPU and RAM over time. OTOH, its bad because I can throw away my old "office" desktop and my "netbook" (it has net in the name!) because they can't browse the average webpage anymore!

In IE10 the css trick doesn’t work and you get two ▲’s, one for upvoting and one for downvoting. See an IE10/Chrome comparison: http://imgur.com/Pe2yKe6

Still likely makes no difference on this site. The percent of people on here on IE10 has got to be almost 0.

Interestingly, you can style it however you want as well. Check this out http://jsfiddle.net/ePA3L/

Probably one of reasons (I hope) : http://imgur.com/xnHmnap

But the up-vote is not otherwise present in your screen shot.

Works for me: http://imgur.com/Ym6iIvd

Terminals have supported unicode (at least partially) for a while. Also, arrows have been available in the charset since DOS times.

Why aren't you using a terminal that can handle UTF-8? Alternatively, why aren't you using a web browser that can handle UTF-8?

> Why aren't you using a terminal that can handle UTF-8?

Perhaps they're still on RHEL5. Many of us are.

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