Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 473 posts

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#281

Post by stinos »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #105
Maxion wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same happens when you: - Install flooring - Install trim in your own home - Build / install cabinets You will now see: - Odd flooring patterns and uneven floors - Know what it looks like when trim isn't coped - Uneven gaps between doors

I’ve noticed these things all my life. Even as a young child I would point such things out and others would have trouble seeing it. Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense. I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.

I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily

All the time, and I learned to not care a lot, even like some; for instance there's a lot of (mostly abstract, surrealism) art which does all the things wrong on that front but which is extremely enjoyable to me. Same weird way with music: exact 4/4 stuff is mostly boring, often even annoying, but give me funky off-beat stuff, chaos and noise and it brings a smile to my face.

There's only one thing which I can't shake off and that's lines which are meant to be, but aren't eaxcatly, parallel or right angles. Can keep staring at those. Especially when they are like very close to being correct but look like they're off (for like 1mm over 1m). Not the first time I actually get up and take a ruler to verify.

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#282

Post by littlestymaar »

datascienced wrote: post #242
littlestymaar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fallback fonts are a legacy of the past though, in an era where everybody ships at least hundred of kilobytes of JS and images (when it's not tens of megabytes, but this is another topic…) there's no good reason to specify a font and hope it will be found on the customer's OS: ship the font you're using.

Depends on who you want to be able to access your site. Not everyone had 10Mbps+

You don't need 10Mbps to download a 30kB font file.

And if you're really targeting people that have trouble loading such a font file, then you have much, much bigger problems than centering things (you basically cannot put any image on your website).

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#283

Post by aidos »

drikerf wrote: post #213
devjab wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with you on this. It’s hard for me to say because I really like the imperfections in things I build, for the most part. Like I’ll full spartle a wall (not entirely sure if this is the correct English description) and I’ll intentionally leave the finish less than “perfect” because I think it adds a little soul to it that will make me happy down the years. Then you have things like floorin…

AFAIK you should always leave space between floor and walls. As the material may grow/shrink with temperature etc. Very noticable in Sweden.

It’s also to prevent moisture issues. If you plaster right down to the floor then the plaster slowly soaks up moisture over time. Instead an unsightly gap is left to prevent this bridging. Skirting / baseboard covers the gap.

So much of what happens in house construction is about water management and without understanding it, it’s common for people to create issues. Regularly see patios that cover airbricks, causing suspended timber floors to rot.

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#284

Post by romwell »

StefanBatory wrote: post #167
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed these things all my life. Even as a young child I would point such things out and others would have trouble seeing it. Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense. I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.

Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.

>Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.

Very much in line with being neurodivergent.

Sounds more like autism than ADHD, but it's hard for me to tell, 'cause I'm both[1].

[1] https://romankogan.net/adhd

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#285

Post by account42 »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #78

Don't read this article, if you are not in web dev. Once you start seeing it, you can't stop seeing it, and it will drive you crazy forever. It is the same for noticing misalignment, recognizing color oversaturation, high quality speakers/headphones, etc. (It is a good article!)

Hi I heard you might like to learn about keming.

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#286

Post by AlienRobot »

Animats wrote: post #72

That's because CSS layout was designed by people who thought "float" and "clear" were a good idea, tables were bad, and, when in doubt, make it Turing-complete and dump the problem on someone else. 2D and 3D tools get this right. CAD programs, game engines, and animation programs are all far better at positioning things. They have far better layout engines and constraint systems. This is really a constraint problem.…

They probably thought we would ditch HTML/CSS for something better but then PHP came around and fixed many of HTML's shortcomings and then AJAX came around and we kept sinking DEEP into this fundamentally broken ecosystem and now it's just too late to leave.

Although, honestly, how hard would it be for Chrome to support some new language called Super Text Markup Language that is designed for modern use with support for templating, portals, actual semantic layouts that don't rely on position on the code, etc.? Perhaps it's time.

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#287

Post by thejohnconway »

wusel wrote: post #245
figassis wrote: post #240

I agree partially, but I also noticed on some projects that not everything looks better when absolutely centered. Sometimes something is centered but looks weird. You nudge it a bit off center and looks perfect.

That's called optical alignment. He somewhat mentions that with the Apple logo example.

I think it's true of some of the other Apple examples that he's put lines over, they look optically correct.

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#288

Post by winternewt »

thejohnconway wrote: post #279
bazoom42 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS never recommended float/clear as an alternative to table-based layout. CSS had ‘display:table’ for when you needed a tabular layout without the semantic baggage of the table-tag.

"CSS" (not sure what you're referring to here, the standards bodies?). Endless articles from the mid 2000s kept saying tables bad, here's how you layout without tables. All of them used floats for layout, not display:table. Partly I suppose this was because IE didn't support it until 2009, I think. Nearly all layouts people actually want are table-like, and I think CSS really was misguided in its text-flow as layout…

The reason for the advice against tables was that the "semantic web" was all the rage (probably mostly because Google wanted to make it easier to index stuff). If you have tabular data, using tables was just fine. The issue was with using it solely to control the graphical presentation without any semantic basis for putting it in the table. Same reason you don't use just to make the text bigger.

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#289

Post by AlienRobot »

coldtea wrote: post #204
yurishimo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, semantics are also good! Yes, CSS grids are a lot like tables in some ways, but not having to add 25% more DOM elements to fake a table layout (display: table/table-row/table-cell; that's 3 divs for one row!) is also a thing to be celebrated. Plus, in practice, grid is a lot more powerful than doing a few common layouts. Grid took so long precisely because they were trying to think a little further ahead rath…

> I mean, semantics are also good! Yes, CSS grids are a lot like tables in some ways, but not having to add 25% more DOM elements to fake a table layout (display: table/table-row/table-cell; that's 3 divs for one row!) is also a thing to be celebrated. Semantics in the context of CSS is a stupid idea web designers came up with. They heard the concept of "semantic", and had to fit it in, to appear smart. Should have a…

Yeah, it's a joke. You can't take "HTML semantics" seriously when you often depend on actual element position IN THE HTML CODE to make things work, specially when modern web design demands elements to just JUMP AROUND all over the page when the width changes.

If they really wanted semantics you would think there would be actual support for that.

By the way, I've asked this question here some other day, but nobody has any idea if most "semantic" tags are being used for anything at all (and Wordpress naturally uses all of them wrong, so there is no point even bothering).

Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things

#290

Post by anonymoushn »

saurik wrote: post #89
anonymoushn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't, you'll be off by 1px?

So, I would use the term "pixel-perfect" to mean that the person making it can target some specific layout, choosing all aspects such as the sizes and fonts and exact colors and such. However, even without that, you can still say "I want this to be monospaced red on a blue background and larger than usual" and all of those properties can vary but hopefully something should happen that preserves at least some of that…

You're right. The browser should just expose this capability and get it right.

Recently I've learned that even the parts of OpenGL which are fully specified give wrong results on ubiquitous hardware+driver combos at the pixel level. The commonly proposed solution is "instead of using the transforms and blending exposed by OpenGL, do it correctly yourself in a shader." Gosh.

Post reply on HN