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Tags to make HTML work like you expect

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#181

Post by 8note »

rob wrote: post #96
ano-ther wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t. HN has just the right information density with its small default font size. In most browsers it is adjustable. And you can pinch-zoom if you’re having trouble hitting the right link. None of the ”content needs white space and large fonts to breathe“ stuff or having to click to see a reply like on other sites. That just complicates interactions. And I am posting this on an iPhone SE while my sight has st…

Yeah, I'm really asking for tons of whitespace and everything to breathe sooooo much by asking for the default font size to be a browser default (16px) and updated to match most modern display resolutions in 2025, not 2006 when it was created. HN is the only site I have to increase the zoom level, and others below are doing the same thing as me. But it must be us with the issues. Obviously PG knew best in 2006 for de…

on mobile at least, i find thati can frequently zoom in, but can almost never zoom out, so smaller text allows for more accessibility than bigger text

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#182

Post by a_cool_username »

torstenvl wrote: post #165
rob wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, don't set the default font size to ~12px equiv in 2025.

[flagged]

Do you think that "Don't do this" as a reply comment is following the spirit of the guidelines? It doesn't seem very thoughtful or substantive to me.

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#183

Post by maxeda »

flymasterv wrote: post #104

I still don’t understand what people think they’re accomplishing with the lang attribute. It’s trivial to determine the language, and in the cases where it isn’t, it’s not trivial for the reader, either.

Another good reason for using the lang attribute is that it makes it possible to enable automatic hyphenation.

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#184

Post by basilikum »

JadeNB wrote: post #147
rob wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm really asking for tons of whitespace and everything to breathe sooooo much by asking for the default font size to be a browser default (16px) and updated to match most modern display resolutions in 2025, not 2006 when it was created. HN is the only site I have to increase the zoom level, and others below are doing the same thing as me. But it must be us with the issues. Obviously PG knew best in 2006 for de…

You're obviously being sarcastic, but I don't think that it's a given that "those are old font-size defaults" means "those are bad font-size defaults." I like the default HN size. There's no reason that my preference should override yours, but neither is there any reason that yours should override mine, and I think "that's how the other sites are" intentionally doesn't describe the HN culture, so it need not describe…

[dead]

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#185

Post by haskellshill »

recursive wrote: post #160
haskellshill wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you misunderstanding on purpose? I am aware they are optional. I am arguing that there is no reason to omit them from your HTML. Whitespace is (mostly) optional in C, does that mean it's a good idea to omit it from your programs? Of course a br tag needs no closing tag because there is no content inside it. How exactly is that an argument for omitting the closing p tag? The XML standard has no relevance to the cu…

I'm beginning to think I'm misunderstanding, but it's not on purpose. Including closing tags as a general rule might make readers think that they can rely on their presence. Also, in some cases they are prohibited. So you can't achieve a simple evenly applied rule anyway.

Well, just because something is allowed by the syntax does not mean it's a good idea, that's why pretty much every language has linters.

And I do think there's an evenly applied rule, namely: always explicitly close all non-void elements. There are only 14 void elements anyway, so it's not too much to expect readers to know them. In your own words "there's no substitute for actually knowing the real rules".

I mean, your approach requires memorizing for which 15 elements the closing tag can be omitted anyway (otherwise you'll mentally parse the document wrong (i.e. thinking a br tag needs to be closed is equally likely as thinking p tags can be nested)).

The risk that somebody might be expecting a closing tag for an hr element seems minuscule and is a small price to pay for conveniences such as (as I explained above) being able to find and replace a p tag or a li tag to a div tag.

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#186

Post by bilkow »

flymasterv wrote: post #174
bilkow wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your whole comment assumes language identification is both trivial and fail-safe. It is neither and it can get worse if you consider e.g. cases where the page has different elements in different languages, different languages that are similar. Even if language identification was very simple, you're still putting the burden on the user's tools to identify something the writer already knew.

Language detection (where “language”== one of the 200 languages that are actually used), IS trivial, given a paragraph of text. And the fact is that the author of the web page doesn’t know the language of the content, if there’s anything user contributed. Should you have to label every comment on HN as “English”? That’s a huge burden on literally every internet user. Other written language has never specified its lan…

> 200 languages that are actually used

Do you have any reference of that or are you implying we shouldn't support the other thousands[0] of languages in use just because they don't have a big enough user base?

> And the fact is that the author of the web page doesn’t know the language of the content, if there’s anything user contributed. Should you have to label every comment on HN as “English”? That’s a huge burden on literally every internet user.

In the case of Hacker News or other pages with user submitted and multi-language content, you can just mark the comments' lang attribute to the empty string, which means unknown and falls back to detection. Alternatively, it's possible to let the user select the language (defaulting to their last used or an auto-detected one), Mastodon and BlueSky do that. For single language forums and sites with no user-generated content, it's fine to leave everything as the site language.

> Other written language has never specified its language. Imposing data-entry requirements on humans to satisfy a computer is never the ideal solution.

There's also no "screen reader" nor "auto translation" in other written language. Setting the content language helps to improve accessibility features that do not exist without computers.

[0] https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/how-many-languages/

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#187

Post by spc476 »

janwillemb wrote: post #134
troupo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every day you can expect 10000 people learning a thing you thought everyone knew: https://xkcd.com/1053/ To quote the alt text: "Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time."

Thanks! I didn't know that one. I had a teacher who became angry when a question was asked about a subject he felt students should already be knowledgeable about. "YOU ARE IN xTH GRADE AND STILL DON'T KNOW THIS?!" (intentional shouting uppercase). The fact that you learned it yesterday doesn't mean all humans in the world also learned it yesterday. Ask questions, always. Explain, always.

Such questions can be jarring though. I remember my "Unix Systems Programming" class in college. It's a third year course. The instructor was describing the layout of a process in memory, "here's the text segment, the data segment, etc." when a student asked, "Where do the comments go?"

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#188

Post by dlisboa »

Someone1234 wrote: post #93
rob wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish `dang` would take some time to go through the website and make some usability updates. HN still uses a font-size value that usually renders to 12px by default as well, making it look insanely small on most modern devices, etc. At quick glance, it looks like they're still using the same CSS that was made public ~13 years ago: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...

I trust dang a lot; but in general I am scared of websites making "usability updates." Modern design trends are going backwards. Tons of spacing around everything, super low information density, designed for touch first (i.e. giant hit-targets), and tons of other things that were considered bad practice just ten years ago. So HN has its quirks, but I'd take what it is over what most 20-something designers would turn…

There's nothing trendy about making sure HN renders like a page from 15 years ago should. Relative font sizes are just so basic they should count as a bug fix and not "usability update".

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#189

Post by crabmusket »

fud101 wrote: post #33
theandrewbailey wrote: post #2

I often reach for the HTML5 boilerplate for things like this: https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/dist/ind...

how do you find this when you need it?

DuckDuckGo "html5 boilerplate", click on website, click on "source code", follow your nose to the index.html file

Re: Tags to make HTML work like you expect

#190

Post by School-Cotton »

rob wrote: post #59
aragonite wrote: post #29

Fun fact: both HN and (no doubt not coincidentally) paulgraham.com ship no DOCTYPE and are rendered in Quirks Mode. You can see this in devtools by evaluating `document.compatMode`. I ran into this because I have a little userscript I inject everywhere that helps me copy text in hovered elements (not just links). It does: [...document.querySelectorAll(":hover")].at(-1) to grab the innermost hovered element. It works…

I wish `dang` would take some time to go through the website and make some usability updates. HN still uses a font-size value that usually renders to 12px by default as well, making it look insanely small on most modern devices, etc. At quick glance, it looks like they're still using the same CSS that was made public ~13 years ago: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...

The text looks perfectly normal-sized on my laptop.
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