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HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#31

Post by p_sherman »

verroq wrote: post #23
philwelch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I felt that it would cross some imaginary line to go around actually flipping tables on HN, so I edited it out of my comment after I saw that it worked. But what the hell: ┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ)

>>>/reddit/

>>>/b/

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#33

Post by garethadams »

masklinn wrote: post #10
michaelkscott wrote: post #8

Yes, this. It will also make the pages render faster. On the homepage alone there are 30 instances of grayarrow.gif.

The image is only loaded once and does not block anything (in fact it's loaded in parallel with — and the same size as — the orange Y logo at the top-left, and the tracking gif). Furthermore the images on YC have extremely low dynamicity and size, so there's little chance they'll be evicted from the browser's cache (short of a manual cache clear), so their 100 bytes will only be loaded once the first time ever you vi…

On the other other hand, it takes 83 bytes of HTML to represent the image tag which requests that 100 bytes of image. It only takes a couple of bytes to represent the Unicode character.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#35

Post by ak0s »

pud wrote: post #9
wangweij wrote: post #4

It will also look crisp on my normal-resolution display. This website's font is too small for me so I always open it in 150%.

Me too. Doesn't it drive you nuts when some sites don't let you resize fonts? Specifically, look at the Facebook comments on Techcrunch. I can zoom in all I want (command-+) but the comments-font stays tiny. My eyes are bad.

You can configure minimum allowed font size in almost any browser.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#38

Post by detst »

dphnx wrote: post #36

I’m more concerned with the lack of DOCTYPE and old-school HTML.

Really? Those are completely irrelevant to me and I have no idea why anyone would care as long as the site functions. It's not ideal and I wouldn't encourage it but does it really matter?

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#39

Post by jawr »

daliusd wrote: post #3

Very good proposal. There are more unicode symbols to choice from: http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/geometric_shapes.html Down arrow/triangle: ▼ It is not only matter of resolution but I personally like bigger fonts and have zoomed in HN so triangles look bad: http://i.imgur.com/fpA7N.png

I also zoom in to 125%, not sure if it's just me, but for a textual site the default font size seems too small. Maybe my eyes are just giving up.

Out of curiosity, I was wondering why the triangle wasn't a CSS triangle.. wouldn't that be more efficient than a gif?

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