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Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

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Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#31

Post by thameera »

aw3c2 wrote: post #20
nness wrote: post #6

I didn't think that was ever in doubt, was it? HN has always been difficult to use on mobile devices due to all the fixed dimensions forcing the page to render at an unsuitable size.

Apart from accidental downvoting I never had any problems with it. Get a browser that nicely reflows and that locks horizontal scrolling nicely (not too much, not too little) and it's a breeze to read and participate. I love that I can choose the font-size and zoom level myself, notblindthankyouverymuch.

What mobile browser do you use?

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#32

Post by devsquid »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
jamespo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the S10 will have a 12" screen

It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.

How does that make sense?

The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of the screen.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#33

Post by thameera »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #29
JDiculous wrote: post #18

It still blows my mind that the text on the HN homepage is unreadably too small on my Samsung Galaxy S4. Surely you guys have enough money and/or technical chops to fix that?

You could enlarge the text?

Except most browsers don't reflow the text correctly so you have to horizontally scroll.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#34

Post by jacquesm »

devsquid wrote: post #32
jacquesm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might, who knows. The compatibility onus is on the device manufacturers, not on the websites. That's the world upside down.

How does that make sense? The device's web browser should attempt to adapt the page to fit the device rather than the site telling the browser how it should adapt to the size of the screen.

Either I don't understand you or we're in agreement. Yes, the device's web browser should do the adaptation, sites can tell browsers whatever they want and browsers are totally free to ignore that information, after all the browser and the device have more information to work with.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#35

Post by zupa-hu »

enraged_camel wrote: post #26
eps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously not a matter of money/chops, but that of the priorities.

Sure, but how hard is it to write some basic CSS? I mean we are talking about making the text bigger when viewed on mobile devices, right?

Maybe it's not an issue for everyone. I'm quite happy with how it is.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#37

Post by jacquesm »

enraged_camel wrote: post #26
eps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously not a matter of money/chops, but that of the priorities.

Sure, but how hard is it to write some basic CSS? I mean we are talking about making the text bigger when viewed on mobile devices, right?

Three browsers across a very large variety of screen sizes, resolutions, colour depths and so on. Clearly writing some 'basic CSS' is not hard but writing future proof CSS that will remain compatible with all the devices that do not exist yet is next to impossible. Therefore backwards compatibility is expected of new devices rather than that we expect existing websites to be forward compatible with devices that do not even exist.

And that's ignoring for the moment the burden of testing a website on all possible devices (which is the way we nowadays go about developing commercial websites, and which is entirely wrong, if a website works on one browser it should work on all, a ship which has long ago sailed but which made good sense at the time and was one of the main reasons the web caught on over all those proprietary and fragmented efforts at information dissemination that preceded it).

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#38

Post by mnem »

jacquesm wrote: post #19

The whole 'not mobile friendly' meme really needs to die. The sites are never at fault, a mobile browser is entirely capable of rendering sites however they see fit and to ignore or incorporate any or all elements of the style sheets and mark-up that a site supplies. The pixel-perfect coupling that people expect between what a site should look like according to the designers and how that site is rendered by the brows…

It's not about being backwardly compatible (by and large most mobile browsers do a sterling job of that), it's about "friendly", which is to say, something which works fairly well with common mobile devices. HN has pretty tiny fonts and very small hit areas for fat human fingers.

Mobile friendly isn't a meme, it's just a description of how well your chosen presentation of content translates into a different context of use. Context changes often require different choices about how you break up your content to throw at someone - this has been the case since the web began.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#40

Post by thameera »

timthelion wrote: post #4

This is a great example of why mobile browsers suck. It is the job of the mobile browser to be able to fix these problems automatically, to resize and reflow text so that it displays properly on the device.

Isn't it the web designer's responsibility to provide enough metadata so that the browser can actually reflow the content without breaking the intended flow? Correctly reflowing a website doesn't sound like something a program could do without knowing enough context.
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