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The new Digg

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Re: The new Digg

#171

Post by mirkules »

eps wrote: post #170
mirkules wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we compensate for a lack of CSS libraries by mixing presentation layer with content layer. Nice.

You brought up the maintenance angle, and the response to that is that in some cases it's far more practical to use js for atyling than to rely purely on css. I gave an example below - a sticky page footer - do show me how to do it in the confines of your abstraction model. Abstarting things for the sake of abstracting is a rather naive approach. It's a good starting point, but some abstractions complicate things way…

While I agree that exceptions in very rare cases are needed, exceptions are becoming the norm and, like I said, are coupling functionality and content. This is why CSS was created, to decouple style from content, and now? We are are throwing all that work away because an entire generation of web devs are just too lazy to look it up.

By the way, a quick search for sticky page footer on Google turned up this as the first result -- no JS needed, and it didn't even look that hard (http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/using-sticky-footer-code.html).

Re: The new Digg

#172

Post by mistercow »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #167
mistercow wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible The thing is, it's not your goal to cater to as many users as possible. It's your goal to optimize your ROI on development time. The reason we have to have laws about accessibility is that your average fast food place knows that wheelchair-bound hamburger sales will never make back the cost of constructing a wheelchair ramp. The economics of the situation wo…

You realize, many countries, most importantly the U.S., have laws regarding making web sites accessible? Section 508 requires that they work with Javascript off. This applies mostly to government sites, but was also used in a case against Target, in which Target lost and was forced to make their website more accessible.

Target's situation was a bit of a special case, however, as it has a brick and mortar store, which the court found their website was essentially a component of. If your business is completely web-based, the question of whether section 508 applies to you is, as far as I know, untested.

Re: The new Digg

#173

Post by qq66 »

freehunter wrote: post #68
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit: All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice. They don't employ canonical or robots.txt. They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered") They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their sit…

The layout breaks without javascript on I see this bandied about on reviews of various sites, and I continue to believe it doesn't matter. If you have Javascript turned off and a page doesn't load, you should know why that page isn't loading. It's because you deliberately broke it for yourself.

That's not entirely true, there are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who use the Web only through a phone, usually a featurephone, and mobile phone Javascript is broken or nonexistent on many of these platforms. These are lower-revenue users, for sure, but there are a LOT of them.

Re: The new Digg

#174

Post by awj »

SimHacker wrote: post #163
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I do. Most of my stuff degrades gracefully, but for the few things which can't (JS demos/game things), I generally do something like this: example.com is a HTML5/ES5/CSS3 3D graphics demo. Unfortunately, your user-agent doesn't seem to support ES5, sorry about that.

Or you could phrase without all the academically correct technical buzzwords, so normal people who are your real audience will understand what you're trying to communicate. Like using "JavaScript" instead of "ES5" and "web browser" instead of "user agent".

> Or you could phrase without all the academically correct technical buzzwords, so normal people who are your real audience will understand what you're trying to communicate.

Normal people who are my real audience probably don't even know how to disable javascript, and most likely would enable it with no fuss if something looked broken.

Re: The new Digg

#175

Post by freehunter »

qq66 wrote: post #173
freehunter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The layout breaks without javascript on I see this bandied about on reviews of various sites, and I continue to believe it doesn't matter. If you have Javascript turned off and a page doesn't load, you should know why that page isn't loading. It's because you deliberately broke it for yourself.

That's not entirely true, there are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who use the Web only through a phone, usually a featurephone, and mobile phone Javascript is broken or nonexistent on many of these platforms. These are lower-revenue users, for sure, but there are a LOT of them.

In that situation, wouldn't it make more sense to show them a completely different site based on browser id? Not just one that doesn't rely on Javascript, but has a completely different layout entirely?

I would still question the millions or billions of users who view the web only on their non-smart-phone who will be using social media like Digg.

Re: The new Digg

#176

Post by freehunter »

mirkules wrote: post #156
mistercow wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible The thing is, it's not your goal to cater to as many users as possible. It's your goal to optimize your ROI on development time. The reason we have to have laws about accessibility is that your average fast food place knows that wheelchair-bound hamburger sales will never make back the cost of constructing a wheelchair ramp. The economics of the situation wo…

I'm tired of having this argument over and over again, so let's approach this Javascript issue from a different angle: It is bad practice to couple content (the "what") with functionality (the "how"). The content itself should not depend on how it is displayed. From an engineering standpoint, this makes your code unmanageable and unmaintainable in the long run. These stupid shortcuts of forcing users to have Javascri…

What if the "what" goes hand in hand with the "how"? A distinctive layout could be of more value than the content, especially when it comes to social media (where the content is roughly the same everywhere you go). What's better, a site that doesn't display until you enable JS (then it displays perfectly) or a site that works without JS, but looks awful and drives away users? If you can't understand that the site doesn't load because you have JS disabled, you won't understand that the site looks like shit for the same reason.

Re: The new Digg

#177

Post by huhtenberg »

mirkules wrote: post #171
eps wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You brought up the maintenance angle, and the response to that is that in some cases it's far more practical to use js for atyling than to rely purely on css. I gave an example below - a sticky page footer - do show me how to do it in the confines of your abstraction model. Abstarting things for the sake of abstracting is a rather naive approach. It's a good starting point, but some abstractions complicate things way…

While I agree that exceptions in very rare cases are needed, exceptions are becoming the norm and, like I said, are coupling functionality and content. This is why CSS was created, to decouple style from content, and now? We are are throwing all that work away because an entire generation of web devs are just too lazy to look it up. By the way, a quick search for sticky page footer on Google turned up this as the fir…

All CSS solutions, including yours, require vertical margins on all page elements to be 0px, which is clearly an obscure and senseless restriction.

Re: The new Digg

#178

Post by johnbellone »

obtu wrote: post #149
johnbellone wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the data included in the purchase of the sale? I am looking at the login page and it seems to require Facebook authentication, and not even an option to use my old Digg.com account. In the FAQ it implies that eventually the old data will return. I'm starting to feel like they decided to release a work-in-progress to capitalize on the wave of press they've received due to the sale. Most people had high hopes for t…

The data was bundled with the domain sale, thankfully. It's a shitty move that they took it offline for an unspecified duration, and that they don't plan to handle existing urls.

That's completely insane. A new design is one thing, but there needs to be a clear and concise reason to break away from URLs that have been indexed, and are likely huge in page rankings.

Re: The new Digg

#180

Post by perssontm »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #42

From a technical point of view this "redesign" scares me a bit: All the old stories and user accounts 404 now. That is a major loss to their SEO. 14 million pages just thrown away and not passing any juice. They don't employ canonical or robots.txt. They have character encoding issues. ("'Superbird' Discovered") They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their sit…

Have they skipped the categories? Is there no sorting whatsoever?

Without categories I'm doomed to read sportsrelated articles...

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