HN is pretty snappy and lightweight, but there's still quite a bit of HTML bloat that could be removed. e.g. all the nested tables, divs, classnames and padding gifs are completely unnecessary, and could be replaced by a single nested list.
Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
321–330 of 398 posts
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve also down voted comments by mistake...
They have added an undown link a while back.
Adding undo changed the feel of downvotes a little. Irreversible accidental downvotes were scattered randomly on comments and they made the occasional downvote feel less harsh.
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#323Hearing the internet is not feasible without ads can't help but wonder what is the economics of running HN?
I had never heard of Y Combinator until Hacker News. As far as brand building goes, most investment companies could only dream of Hacker News.
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#324I love hearing stories about people choosing to forego large frontend frameworks, or even not using JS altogether. Is there a community or name for this? If not, I'm going to call it #neverscript. I find the web works far better, more often, for me when SPAs and JS aren't used. There's something about minimalistic sites that's very appealing to me. I know it doesn't work for all sites, but a lot of the web could be i…
When you're not using frameworks/libraries, it's typically referred to as vanilla js . Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/ . This was basically around the time browsers got good enough that jQuery was no longer needed. It essentially emphasized that all the showcase features of popular 'must-have' js libraries were now a standard part of modern browsers.
>Probably the name stuck thanks to this amazing satire of a js library. http://vanilla-js.com/
Using "vanilla" to describe a standard, unmodified and un-customized version of something is a very common idiom. This satirical website followed the convention, it didn't coin the expression. I don't think it's even jargon, it's just based on the meaning of the adjective "vanilla":
Lacking adornments or special features; basic or ordinary: "a delicious twist to a vanilla plot" (Ian O'Connor).
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
>almost all other sites are. That's their point. You're not wrong, you can always be better, but HN is barebones compared to almost all (using the mathematical definition...alright, facetiously using it) other sites.
Comparing to Facebook is probably the worst possible comparison, though, and doesn't seem representative of most other sites.
Only a very few sites are not bloated Facebook clone abominations.
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's nothing more than an extra header or query param to denote an AJAX request. Then the server can respond with an empty 200/204 status code instead of the entire HTML page. It's an hour of work and would actually save resources. None of this requires a front-end framework.
HN works perfectly with javascript dissabled. It’s a feature
We're talking about it working better when JS is enabled.
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#327I quite like the blog https://qntm.org/ which has a minimalist design in this sense.
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you have JavaScript disabled, right? If so, can you give an example of a similar webpage that doesn’t reload the whole page to reflect your vote?
You're correct that when JS is disabled, any interaction requires a HTTP request from a link or form, and that does a full page reload. However when JS and AJAX is used, it's expected that it also avoids an entire full-page HTML response that goes unused. It can easily be a 204 instead.
Can't frame tags reload independently?
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#329Right now I'm traveling in a train somewhere in Smolensk region in Russia and HN is the only site I could use normally with sporadic Edge/3G. Had exactly the same thought as in the title. Thanks HN! +1 for a dark theme though, reading from a bright screen in midnight darkness hurts eyes. Another frequent thought I have during such trips is why so few sites have any basic offline support? E.g. while writing this I mov…
Privet :)
Re: Tell HN: Thank you for not redesigning Hacker News
#330If you want to keep that performance but still want HN to be a bit more "appealing", try a browser extension. This way it looks nicer but the styles are stored locally.