Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

Your not understanding something isn't necessarily a sign that it is incorrect. It's not necessarily a sign that you're being trolled either. Obviously a position that one does not understand is probably a suboptimal starting point for developing a coherent counter-argument due to the risk that one's comment be seen as constructing a strawman.

One of the things I've learned on HN is that, just asking someone to clarify their idea before responding is surprisingly useful. It disarms the troll because it breaks the pattern. It allows an earnest person to attempt to clarify their thoughts or will be ignored by someone with low interest in further discussion. It's also a good way for me to express genuine curiosity.

Accusing me of trolling you for a third time on this page and focusing on "any offense" rather than your behavior isn't an apology...even ignoring the comparison to a schizophrenic individual. Other than the delete link, there isn't an HN appropriate way to express the sort of sentiments you're interested in expressing.

It is now clear that in the third paragraph of my response, I chose my words poorly. I had thought that the previous two 'graphs would make my new knowledge vis a vis my grave error in judgement clear. It is obvious that I was incorrect.

For a third time, I apologise for the hasty, completely unfounded, and obviously incorrect assertion regarding your mental capacity.

> One of the things I've learned on HN is that, just asking someone to clarify their idea before responding is surprisingly useful. It disarms the troll because it breaks the pattern.

Frankly, I have rarely found this strategy to be of use. In my experience, the troller typically continues full steam ahead.

Note that in our conversations, I did exactly as you suggest. Twice. Indeed, please kindly go back and look at our conversations with fresh eyes.

You open with:

"Why can I use a cookie rather than a GUI to log into HackerNews? Why can I use Oauth to log into StackOverflow? Would it be better if we all had to use a keyboard wudgut?

The idea that GUI's are great was good forty years ago when men worried about catching typing-pool-koodies from keyboards; college students would hire typists to turn longhand drafts into print on a page; and the only form of search was query..."

I counter with a question, anecdote, and a book recommendation:

"You suggest that we use CLIs for pretty much every task?

I -happily- spend most of my day in one CLI or another, but there are many, many things for which interactive graphical display of information is just the best choice.

If you never have done so, find a copy of Edward Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". You really need to find a professionally-printed dead-tree version; computer screens still can't do the book justice."

You reply:

"Tufte is a good starting point, remove what is unnecessary. One "7/19/15" is a better user experience than three wudguts with 12-31 items each.

["Koodies" alliterates better with "keyboard" more Carrollingean like "wudguts".]"

In another thread:

You (replying to the comment "[brudgers] (probably) posts to HN through a web GUI"):

"I used a browser and a keyboard to hit the address bar and enter the URI and type my comment. Logging into HN did not required HTTPS, not GUI."

Me, attempting to establish what exactly it is that you consider to be a GUI:

"Did you know that even Lynx is properly considered a GUI? It's a text-mode GUI, but a GUI nonetheless.

Edit: To figure out where you're coming from: do you consider text editors like vim, nano, and pico to be GUIs or CLIs? Why do you hold this opinion?"

You:

"Ed is a visual line editor, and if that's a GUI then we can stop talking about PARC and just agree that Brainfuck is as good as Python via Turing Completeness while we're at it."

Can you see how a reasonable person might see your replies as extreme obliqueness and refusal to engage in productive conversation? I directly asked you for your opinion, twice in an effort to both steer the conversation in a productive direction and help me to understand your position, as I was having great difficulty determining it[0] from your comments up to that point.

[0] I mean, anything more nuanced than "NoGUI!". :)

Apology accepted.

Heh. You still refuse to elaborate on the finer points of NoGUI, even when asked, directly.

If you are the old-timer that you imply that you are, you'll recognize this one:

PLONK!

User-scaling of the viewport is thankfully not the only way of enlarging text inside of a web page. It's possible to design a site that allows the user to change the font-size of relevant UI controls without rendering the layout wider than the device screen (causing the user to have to pan around to read it).

If you're not providing a better experience than a fully working desktop site, then you shouldn't attempt responsive design at all and let mobile users use a non-targeted but working site. I only shut of user-scaling on sites where the targeted mobile experience is better than a scaled fully-working desktop layout.