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Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

unim.press

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Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#51

Please do not use justified formatting for text unless you can hyphenate it. Otherwise you end up with large chunks of white space between the words, especially in narrower (then 6070 characters) columns. Browsers don’t hyphenate, so avoid justified text on the web.

Browsers do hyphenate, and this page enables it, with the "hyphens: auto" CSS rule. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens

In Google Chrome, you'll see that it hyphenates "profes-sional" in the second story of the center column. It's still not enough, though, because it still leaves huge gaps in the justified text; it works best when you use width: 80ch. The page is currently using width: 600px, which is approximately 67ch.

(If you don't see hyphenation in Safari, that's because the developer didn't enable -webkit-hyphens. If you don't see hyphenation in Firefox, that's because the page's tag doesn't have a lang="en" attribute.)

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not entirely true is it? Browsers can hyphenate (using the hyphen property in CSS) but it only supports certain languages, which need to be specified in the lang attribute of the html tag.

Support just isn't universal enough.[1] In particular, for Chromium-based, > Only supported on Android & Mac platforms (and only the "auto" value) for now. Even where the property is supported, the supported language matrix [2] tells a depressing story. [1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-hyphens [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens#Bro...

Wow, I should know better. That’s pretty awful support.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#55
It hangs on "reading stories".

Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at all, which is a default error handling method for big chunk of web apps.

I think (but can be wrong) that by using such a dynamic environment like JS is the culprit for lack of good error checking mechanism.

Also one thought of mine for the reason why even big companies are unwilling to provide good error messages is that it's impossible to get the real reason. There may be so many moving parts that even the developer isn't able to handle it all. Which sparks a doubt in my mind if this environment is really fit enough to provide high quality software. Since it's so popular it's obvious that it has some aspects that it does right, but it seems that the web app environment could benefit from some fundamental changes.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#56
Several years ago there was an extremely popular app that was an RSS newsfeed aggregator for iPads with an unfortunately very generic name called "the magazine" that did this exact same thing, it embedded the articles in a newspaper aesthetic. Great stuff.

I used it extensively on an iPad first generation but unfortunately it's no longer available on the App Store.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#58

It hangs on "reading stories". Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at a…

It actually does handle errors properly -- the reddit api is probably blocked for you, which is why it hangs and can't do anything. I suppose I could have added a "it seems we can't reach Reddit" kind of message, but that would still have been an error state, and in rushing this out in an afternoon it wasn't much of a priority.

Didn't realize until posting here that apparently Firefox blocks the reddit api from the browser in certain common configurations. So maybe that would have been useful.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#59

It hangs on "reading stories". Web app authors can be very creative, but one thing I don't like about web apps is that often their error handling is nonexistent. It's not about individual authors; behemots like Microsoft also do this in an irritating way: "Something did not work. Reload the page please" -- Is this really the best a billion dollar company can do? Well, I suppose this is still better than no error at a…

> I think (but can be wrong) that by using such a dynamic environment like JS is the culprit for lack of good error checking mechanism.

Not at all. It's perfectly possible to implement solid error handling. There's even a global handler: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/GlobalEvent....

For legacy scenarios (IE11) you can add an event handler for the error event, so you end up with something like the following to deal with both situations:

    window.onerror = yourErrorHandlerFunction;
    window.addEventListener('error', yourErrorEventHandlerFunction);
The shape of the objects passed in differs slightly, hence the need for two different handlers. In my case one simply repackages the object and hands it off to the other.

Re: Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

#60

Please do not use justified formatting for text unless you can hyphenate it. Otherwise you end up with large chunks of white space between the words, especially in narrower (then 6070 characters) columns. Browsers don’t hyphenate, so avoid justified text on the web.

That’s not entirely true is it? Browsers can hyphenate (using the hyphen property in CSS) but it only supports certain languages, which need to be specified in the lang attribute of the html tag.

but it only supports certain languages

Probably because hyphenation is itself a rabbit-hole of complexity; some languages may require a complete dictionary to determine where words can be hyphenated, and sometimes it could depend on what style guide you follow, etc.

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