Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly • Hacker News Board

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#61

Post by riffraff » Sun, May 03, 2015, 11:40 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #46

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…

The up/downvote buttons on HN are an example of 'not mobile friendly'. They work fine with a pointer, but not with a touchscreen - you often see someone apologise for downmodding when they meant to upmod, because of this problem. Pointer-driven UI and touchscreen UI have different local maxima. One of the reasons Ubuntu's Unity looks like it does is because they intend for it to look and work well on both UI types.

FWIW, opera (on iOS at least) did this right years ago, when I hit the area it just zooms in and highlights both clickable areas, so I can effectively click on the up or down arrow.

(OTOH, the up/down buttons on HN are not desktop friendly either)

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#62

Post by seba_dos1 » Sun, May 03, 2015, 11:41 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #14

moepstar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^this. And: It pisses me off to no end that Google is in the position to decide how a site has to look like on $device. They announce that you will get a worse SERP if your site doesn't do X and everyone scrambles to please mighty G. If they decide that every site has to have a yellow background, starting next week, what will you do? Give in?

The whole business model of Google is knowledge about what users want to see on the web. And their judgements about it are context-specific: they are true for the current situation, when the mobile browsers work as they do. If Google is wrong, and users want the sites that are _not_ optimized for mobile, they will lose their market share. However, if they are right, and the users _do_ want to see sites optimised for…

What if my target audience is actually that 1% niche that doesn't care about mobile, or a niche that actually uses decent browsers and mobile platforms, so they're perfectly able to view my simple page even without stupid meta viewport tag?

It seems easy to just add the tag and a few CSS rules - but what if this is a still useful page from 2005 which I have forgotten about?

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#63

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#64

Post by jrs235 » Sun, May 03, 2015, 12:07 PM UTC

The biggest winners of this change are the SEO companies that charge small businesses lots of money who will now charge them lots of money to make sure their website is mobile friendly (even if it already is).

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#65

Post by jekrb » Sun, May 03, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #60

dustinleblanc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No those websites should be expected to be readable at all times, but it up to the provider of the content to make that happen. Old sites read fine, as long as their stylesheet didn't make decisions to try to look a certain way at a certain resolution. If you never made the decision to write your styles a certain way, you don't have to worry about wierd rendering issues. Unless we want to force folks to use Lynx, it…

You utterly mis-understand the nature of the relationship between the server provided stream of information and the browser. Websites are not pixel perfect renditions created by dictates issued from servers, they are streams of information decorated with meta-data that give hints on how the information could be rendered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext > A browser can not predict the particulars of my design w…

Are you saying that sites that don't provide a positive experience across screen sizes shouldn't worry? Because browsers aren't supposed to do anything besides present information?

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#66

Post by jacquesm » Sun, May 03, 2015, 1:56 PM UTC

jekrb wrote: post #65

jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You utterly mis-understand the nature of the relationship between the server provided stream of information and the browser. Websites are not pixel perfect renditions created by dictates issued from servers, they are streams of information decorated with meta-data that give hints on how the information could be rendered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext > A browser can not predict the particulars of my design w…

Are you saying that sites that don't provide a positive experience across screen sizes shouldn't worry? Because browsers aren't supposed to do anything besides present information?

Sites don't worry, people do and plenty of sites are divorced from the people that created them. In the interest of keeping that information accessible the onus is first and foremost on the makers of the consumption devices and associated browsers to render that content as accurately as possible. Regressions (where content that rendered just fine on previous generation devices but where future devices for whatever reason fail to display this content) should be avoided where possible.

Note that in the case of content such as 'flash', 'silverlight' and other plug-in related content this is going to be a major problem.

Finally, in the interest of commerce and user experience website owners are free to improve their sites to enhance the experience for their users but they should not be required to get basic functionality working.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#67

Post by golergka » Sun, May 03, 2015, 2:13 PM UTC

seba_dos1 wrote: post #62

golergka wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model of Google is knowledge about what users want to see on the web. And their judgements about it are context-specific: they are true for the current situation, when the mobile browsers work as they do. If Google is wrong, and users want the sites that are _not_ optimized for mobile, they will lose their market share. However, if they are right, and the users _do_ want to see sites optimised for…

What if my target audience is actually that 1% niche that doesn't care about mobile, or a niche that actually uses decent browsers and mobile platforms, so they're perfectly able to view my simple page even without stupid meta viewport tag? It seems easy to just add the tag and a few CSS rules - but what if this is a still useful page from 2005 which I have forgotten about?

Then Google sees that they don't use mobile devices when they search and your mobile unfriendliness doesn't affect search results.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#68

Post by falcolas » Sun, May 03, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

I'd like to take this moment to point out that a few weeks ago, HN did try for a mobile friendly styling, and the HN population at large rose enough of a fuss about "it looked fine as it was before" that they reverted it back.

We can't have it both ways.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#69

Post by falcolas » Sun, May 03, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

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…

The browser, by default, styles most content pretty well. It's the designers who have asked for and gotten all of the tools which break how our web looks, via CSS and JavaScript. If we really wanted the browsers to decide how the content should look, then we shouldn't have given the designers these tools in the first place.

The "let the browser decide" ship has sailed, and the designers won (with our support, I might add). All we can do now is use those a same tools to take back control.

Re: Google to Hacker News: Not Mobile-Friendly

#70

Post by gremlinsinc » Sun, May 03, 2015, 6:23 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #37

enraged_camel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Seriously, all they need to do is throw in Twitter Bootstrap, re-change some div classes, and bam mobile friendly.. It's not like the site has a lot of eye candy that needs changed anyhow...