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HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

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11–20 of 190 posts

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#11
post #9
post #4

It will also look crisp on my normal-resolution display. This website's font is too small for me so I always open it in 150%.

Me too. Doesn't it drive you nuts when some sites don't let you resize fonts? Specifically, look at the Facebook comments on Techcrunch. I can zoom in all I want (command-+) but the comments-font stays tiny. My eyes are bad.

It's not just on TC. I keep meaning to get around to writing a Chrome extension to fix that on sites for myself.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#14
post #9
post #4

It will also look crisp on my normal-resolution display. This website's font is too small for me so I always open it in 150%.

Me too. Doesn't it drive you nuts when some sites don't let you resize fonts? Specifically, look at the Facebook comments on Techcrunch. I can zoom in all I want (command-+) but the comments-font stays tiny. My eyes are bad.

Not really techcrunch's fault, that. It's because facebook comments are loaded via an iframe, browsers probably don't transfer the "outer" zoom to the "inner" one all cases.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#15

Huh, I didn't know Arc was that good at Unicode. It even renders the flip table emoticon.

(╯ಠ益ಠ)╯︵ ┻━┻ So it does. This may or may not be a good thing.

I felt that it would cross some imaginary line to go around actually flipping tables on HN, so I edited it out of my comment after I saw that it worked. But what the hell:

┬──┬◡ノ(° -°ノ)

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#18
post #16
post #7

Or go contentless via CSS triangles: http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/css-triangle/

Any particular reason to use CSS triangles over Unicode arrow characters?

It works even if the font doesn't support all unicode characters.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#20

Yes, this. It will also make the pages render faster. On the homepage alone there are 30 instances of grayarrow.gif.

The image is only loaded once and does not block anything (in fact it's loaded in parallel with — and the same size as — the orange Y logo at the top-left, and the tracking gif). Furthermore the images on YC have extremely low dynamicity and size, so there's little chance they'll be evicted from the browser's cache (short of a manual cache clear), so their 100 bytes will only be loaded once the first time ever you vi…

The image is only downloaded once, but each page you load re-requests it. If your account has enough karma to downvote posts, you're requesting two array gifs per page view.

There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images. A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.

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