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

Post by prennert » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 9:41 AM UTC

Post by bonoboTP » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 9:48 AM UTC

self_awareness wrote: post #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 a…

Post by sergeykish » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

dfabulich wrote: post #51

andrei_says_ wrote: post #43

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, whi…

    var Hyphenopoly = {
      require: {
        "en-us": "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
      },
      setup: {
        selectors: {
            ".story": {}
        },
        CORScredentials: "omit"
      }
    }
    script = document.createElement('script')
    script.src = 'https://unpkg.com/hyphenopoly@4.5.0/min/Hyphenopoly_Loader.js'
    document.body.append(script)

Post by ape4 » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #84

self_awareness wrote: post #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 a…

They (MS etc) know the error alright, but users get scared and overwhelmed by technical language and error messages. So they put some picture of a sad cat and a message like "zoinks, that didn't work, try again". And anyway, if you're going to reload anyway, why would you care about the exact error? Hopefully it got logged in their systems so the engineers can come back to it. Beyond nerd curiosity, why would a user…

Post by StrangeSound » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

thesephist wrote: post #58

self_awareness wrote: post #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 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 b…