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HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 190 posts

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

#61
post #7

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

I think it would be incorrect to use css to create an interactive object, a page should be 100% usable without css. And probably font rendering is a lot faster than css rendering, though I couldn't find a similar benchmark

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

#62

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

Alternatively it doesn't care at all. I mean, it may not even try to check the incoming encoding or do anything with it and you'd still get the right result if your browser behaves in a sane way (that is sends utf form contents to this site). It's just some bytes after all. But I don't know the arc internals - does it do anything interesting with unicode?

Dunno, the public releases are usually behind HN anyway. I'm just going off some old (really old) pg quotes where he just said Arc only did ASCII, because he didn't care about text encodings that much. The question is why HN is somehow sending the right text encoding headers.

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

#66
i use a custom css with pentadactyl and the following:

  @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com"),
                 domain("news.ycombinator.org"),
                 domain("news.ycombinator.net") {
    a[id^=up_] {
      padding: 0px 4px 0px 4px !important;
      color: #cb4b16 !important; }
    a[id^=up_] img {
       display: none; }
    a[id^=up_]:before {
       content: "▴"; }
  }

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

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they not logical opposites? Isn't an upvote exactly the opposite of a downvote?

Upvote = I like this. Downvote = This is noise/off-topic/abusive. Thats the way it should work, and is part of what makes HN different to say Reddit. In reality, its becoming increasingly common for people to downvote something simply because they disagree with it.

Then upvote/downvote are the wrong semantics for what you are proposing. Change them to "like" and "spam". For a multi-lingual audience, that is easier to grok than to hash the up/down arrows.

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

#68
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also zoom in to 125%, not sure if it's just me, but for a textual site the default font size seems too small. Maybe my eyes are just giving up. Out of curiosity, I was wondering why the triangle wasn't a CSS triangle.. wouldn't that be more efficient than a gif?

Not necessarily. The gif is requested once and cached, and then rendered once and cached. The CSS triangle would get rendered over and over again.

Rendered once and cached? The cached GIF is rendered each time as well. As far as I know, it's not possible to cache a rendering. There are still calculations to do each time you want to convert the cached data into an image. The question then becomes, which calculations take longer. The calculations needed to convert the CSS into a bitmap for the screen, or the calculations needed to convert the GIF data into a bitmap for the screen. I'm betting the difference is negligible.

(If I have misunderstood some step of the rendering process, I would love to know how, or what. I don't know much about graphics processing, so I am unaware of any caches beyond what the browser maintains.)

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

#69

And please put more whitespace between links so us iPhone users can press on links without accidentally hitting the comments link. Thanks :)

On iPhone I always use - http://ihackernews.com/

Yes but I don't like the idea of passing my username/password through a 3rd party. HN is big enough that it should have its own mobile friendly layout.

I've hit "flag" when I meant to hit the story. I've hit the story when I meant to hit the comments. We need a HN hosted CSS layout for mobile users. This site is pretty simple, how complicated could a mobile CSS file be?

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

#70
post #3

Very good proposal. There are more unicode symbols to choice from: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/geometric_shapes.html Down arrow/triangle: ▼ It is not only matter of resolution but I personally like bigger fonts and have zoomed in HN so triangles look bad: http://i.imgur.com/fpA7N.png

We could use the "pile of poo" (http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm) character for downvote instead!
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