181–190 of 209 posts
This is great. The large scrolling format (similar to pinterest) is a good idea as the last thing that was needed was something that looked like reddit or HN. Sites like the Daily Mail have been very successful with this style. Good luck to the new Digg team!
Looks like a sparse Huffington Post to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are free to believe that. But let us say I want to cater both to you and to another user that browses the web with NoScript (assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible). I have two options: A) make the layout accessible without JavaScript B) break the layout without JavaScript. Only with option A do I cater to both of you -- Regardless of deliberate breaking or bandied opinions ("Thou shalt never…
The problem with NoScript is that it intentionally breaks the intended functionality of a website. I just went into the Firefox element inspector and deleted the code for the list of links on the HN homepage. Now they're gone! How dare PG not cater to my will to randomly disable parts of the website? You're free to browse the web with parts of it turned off. But you should expect that parts of it might not work, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are free to believe that. But let us say I want to cater both to you and to another user that browses the web with NoScript (assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible). I have two options: A) make the layout accessible without JavaScript B) break the layout without JavaScript. Only with option A do I cater to both of you -- Regardless of deliberate breaking or bandied opinions ("Thou shalt never…
Catering to NoScript users is dead simple - show them a broken website and they will whitelist it. Seriously though, NoScript user base is - and let me really blunt about it - a vocal minority with a bloated sense of entitlement. Catering to them makes no practical sense. There are obviously edge cases, but the best option is to put up a note that JS is required. If Digg doesn't have it, they should add it, but beyon…
There is a philosophy (with some merit) of worse is better. So, let's be honest... you're promoting sloppy coupling in order to save developer time. The problem is that the technical debt will have to be paid back in the future.
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…
Then, taking that HTML and enhancing it with JavaScript (aka progressive enhancement) is also a violation of separation of concerns, and I would argue against it in any but the very simplest of cases. Instead, you should use JavaScript to operate on the raw data and display it to the user. You can then also write server-side code that generates a plain-HTML rendering of that same content, but that is more work, and that means it's a trade-off.
And I think in many cases that trade-off is worthwhile. But this idea that it somehow saves you time in the long run and doesn't end up costing you is pure fantasy.
>But you or everyone else on the JS bandwagon
God, that's annoying. My pointing out a flaw in a particular argument does not imply that I am "on the bandwagon" opposing that argument. I think that making your content accessible without JavaScript is a good idea whenever possible, but I do not think it is useful to pretend that you can do so without trade-offs. I don't have to agree with an argument just because I agree with its conclusion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are free to believe that. But let us say I want to cater both to you and to another user that browses the web with NoScript (assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible). I have two options: A) make the layout accessible without JavaScript B) break the layout without JavaScript. Only with option A do I cater to both of you -- Regardless of deliberate breaking or bandied opinions ("Thou shalt never…
Catering to NoScript users is dead simple - show them a broken website and they will whitelist it. Seriously though, NoScript user base is - and let me really blunt about it - a vocal minority with a bloated sense of entitlement. Catering to them makes no practical sense. There are obviously edge cases, but the best option is to put up a note that JS is required. If Digg doesn't have it, they should add it, but beyon…
In short, no you are not. Get over yourselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are free to believe that. But let us say I want to cater both to you and to another user that browses the web with NoScript (assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible). I have two options: A) make the layout accessible without JavaScript B) break the layout without JavaScript. Only with option A do I cater to both of you -- Regardless of deliberate breaking or bandied opinions ("Thou shalt never…
The problem with NoScript is that it intentionally breaks the intended functionality of a website. I just went into the Firefox element inspector and deleted the code for the list of links on the HN homepage. Now they're gone! How dare PG not cater to my will to randomly disable parts of the website? You're free to browse the web with parts of it turned off. But you should expect that parts of it might not work, and…
Yes, it should be immediately obvious, but often it isn't, and that's my biggest complaint with sites that rely on scripting for basic behavior.
Too many times I've filled in a form, hit the Submit button, only to find that proper form submission does not work without scripting. Nothing on the page warned me, nothing stopped me from filling in the form, even though there are snake-simple ways to tell no-scripters of missing behavior, or to simply prevent bad behavior when scripting is turned off.
(The other complaint I have is why sites rely on scripting to do things that are baked into HTML. For example, using divs as text areas instead of, say, using a textarea as a text areas.)
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…
Seriously, it's been what, a month since they started working? They wanted to ship, and ship fast. It's not ideal (no software is ever ideal) but it works. I'm happy they managed to release something after just a month of work. They will now get the feedback and see how users are welcoming the new version.
The comments are much more important than page layout or the number of tweets.
When I open it, I have no idea what I am supposed to do. Information dense pictures are being shown to me across two dimensions, my eyes have no clue what flow to follow.
Newspapers have had hundreds of years to learn how to make these sort of layouts work, it seems like Digg said "screw that, we're just going to shove it all out there!"
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…
> They don't employ canonical or robots.txt.
doesn't matter
> They use a meta keywords tag, and it contains "celebrity news", which doesn't appear anywhere on their site.
doesn't matter
> They hardcode CSS with styles on div's. They don't use text-transform but type headers in all-caps.
doesn't matter
etc...