141–150 of 399 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.
I generally agree. But thumbs up/down is difficult on mobile with my fat fingers, even worse since I've had nervr damage.
Sites are not detecting a portrait screen and deciding that they're displaying on a phone. Someone who switches their monitor to portrait, or resizes a window to be taller than it is wide, is still going to get the desktop view. In this case the author is scaling their resolution, and so their browser is presenting itself to sites as 720px wide. Sites see that and show a layout optimized for a screen of that width. T…
Agreed completely. One mistake that designers/developers do though is to completely give up under 1000px so we get this swaths of whitespace and a hamburger. That’s a waste of estate and a waste of my time.
Unfortunately, the horizontal scrolling UX with substantial wasted whitespace on the sides remains.
I'm fine with HN on mobile, but it is really hard to press the buttons with my large fingers on a mobile screen. But much easier on a 800x600 monitor using a ball mouse. For HN I don't really mind, as a pinch to zoom.
To check for touch, there is `Navigator.maxTouchPoints` but this might backfire on some laptop which have touch screen (which you usually use for drawing rather than UI, but your mileage may vary).
But I think the core issue is much earlier in design. Many websites and app have complicated design/UI while it could be simpler, and they split their UI into mobile and desktop very early in the design process, which leads to two very different version. And while I agree that mobile and desktop are different experience, I think you can keep them close in term of UI and UX.
For example, let's say you want tooltip, on desktop this is a normal UI control which is natural, but on mobile it is not, so instead of using tooltip on desktop and "think of something" when doing the mobile version, we need to design early for both. Today, many website and apps are designed with a "mobile first" mindset, and this cause problem when used on desktop. The solution is not better detection of either platform, but better design to keep them as close as possible.
Of course, there is also the issue of scaling text vs scaling the whole site, and this is not very well handled by many website, even with the "let's use em/rem units".
I wish for once that requesting “Desktop version” on my phone would actually give me a desktop view, not the same exact mobile view. Sizing based on viewport (a “responsive design” principle that I hate) gives me hamburgerized unusable mess. I want to be able to zoom out to see the same page features as I would see on desktop. A lot of websites USED to work this way on ios Safari before “responsive design” became a t…
Some people try to implement fancy heuristics that fails for some users but not enough to care to fix.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that what this is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/aspe...
I think primarily that's for constraining a div's aspect-ratio. Like making sure you have a div that's always 16:9 to hold a video player. I'd be interested in hearing other use cases, though.
Sites are not detecting a portrait screen and deciding that they're displaying on a phone. Someone who switches their monitor to portrait, or resizes a window to be taller than it is wide, is still going to get the desktop view. In this case the author is scaling their resolution, and so their browser is presenting itself to sites as 720px wide. Sites see that and show a layout optimized for a screen of that width. T…
I can't use HackerNews on my monitor without scaling. If I press Ctrl+0 on Chrome, the site becomes unusable.
Specifically, they have:
.comment {
font-size: 9pt;
}
.commhead {
font-size: 8pt;
}
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar. There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS. There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in re…
> There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic Are you entirely sure about that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't address the author's central argument, which is that websites need an effortless way of letting fonts become bigger without affecting the entire layout. I've wanted it too. I don't really care if some text gets cut off on headers and looks weird, I just want to read stuff from the comfort of my bed with my laptop a few feet away.
I love that Chrome on Android lets me zoom into any content on any site, regardless of how bad the devs borked the UX. (Yes, devs, if you don't allow me to zoom using the browser's built-in capabilities, you have borked the UX, and should be ashamed of yourselves.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar. There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS. There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in re…
If you weren't aware https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc may be helpful. There are some basic options for text formatting on HN, including italics and bold.