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HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

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

#91

Post by DanBC »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #71
sandGorgon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then upvote/downvote are the wrong semantics for what you are proposing. Change them to "like" and "spam". For a multi-lingual audience, that is easier to grok than to hash the up/down arrows.

I'm not proposing anything. "Upvote" and "downvote" are the names given to functions of the HN site. My descriptions of those words are my understanding of the consensus among HN users on what they mean and how they should be used. If my understanding of that consensus is wrong then I hope that others users will put me right. Edit: Would whoever downvoted this care to explain why? I'm genuinely interested.

Ignore the downvotes. Unless you get more than one.

It would be nice if Upvote meant "This is good quality (whether I agree with it or not" and downvote meant "this is low quality, and should not be here, but is not spam, nor flagable". But since PG has said (something like) downvote can be simple disagreement you're going to meet people who use it for exactly that.

Also, reddit is trying to move away from "downvote to disagree" - they have a lot of hover text saying this.

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

#92

Post by kellros »

captn3m0 wrote: post #19

Browsing HN with images disabled is impossible(no voting) for this reason (I wrote about it at https://gist.github.com/2947068 )

True, the 'icon' for up-voting is an image and can be easily replaced by the unicode equivalent.

HN uses an image in javascript to simulate a HTTP GET request to signal that you have voted.

ex. var img = new Image(); img.src = 'http://ycombinator.com/signal-voted?id=12345;

Makes sense because HN is not using jQuery or similar and it would be a lot more javascript to do it in a cross browser way (just source view hacker news - it's almost as small as it gets)

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

#93

Post by entropy_ »

lucian1900 wrote: post #41
jawr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not necessarily. The gif is requested once and cached, and then rendered once and cached. The CSS triangle would get rendered over and over again.

All that for a difference that would be negligible anyway. I'd say that's a premature optimization if I've ever seen one.

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

#94

Post by Doches »

silon3 wrote: post #85
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 use Firefox "Zoom text only" which only zooms text.

I like how you felt the need to explain the meaning of the phrase "zoom text only."

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

#96

Post by maggit »

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

It is also a matter of subpixel anti-aliasing, and that makes a surprisingly big difference in my experience!

http://i.imgur.com/sFrFT.png

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

#97

Post by masklinn »

ars wrote: post #76
getsat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The image is only downloaded once, but each page you load re-requests it. If your account has enough karma to downvote posts, you're requesting two array gifs per page view. There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images. A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each.

> There's no Expires header being set, so your browser is not caching these images. That is not in the slightest correct. It has both a Last-Modified and an Etag so it's definitely cached. > A full roundtrip to the HN server to get back the "content hasn't changed" status code (304) is required for each. Also incorrect. The roundtrip is done once per session. A session is not well defined, but it's basically till you…

> It has both a Last-Modified and an Etag so it's definitely cached.

Even without that, it'd still be cached: pretty much all browsers will cache things by default.

Last-Modified and Etag only come into play when the internal cache expires (this expiration time can be configured with the HTTP/1.0 Expires header or the HTTP/1.1 Cache-Control: max-age attribute, but the timeout does not default to "don't cache anything").

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

#99

Post by nsns »

DanBC wrote: post #91
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proposing anything. "Upvote" and "downvote" are the names given to functions of the HN site. My descriptions of those words are my understanding of the consensus among HN users on what they mean and how they should be used. If my understanding of that consensus is wrong then I hope that others users will put me right. Edit: Would whoever downvoted this care to explain why? I'm genuinely interested.

Ignore the downvotes. Unless you get more than one. It would be nice if Upvote meant "This is good quality (whether I agree with it or not" and downvote meant "this is low quality, and should not be here, but is not spam, nor flagable". But since PG has said (something like) downvote can be simple disagreement you're going to meet people who use it for exactly that. Also, reddit is trying to move away from "downvote…

I agree, but I also believe a little ambiguity and heterogeneous modes of use are actually beneficial, make the place alive. I tend to up-vote people who make efforts and contribute important information or opinions, not necessarily those I agree with. (Will only down-vote trolls.)

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

#100

Post by jurre »

LeafStorm wrote: post #89
Inversechi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one get down-vote?

I'm pretty sure you get downvoting powers at 500 karma. (At least, that's about when I got them. I have heard rumors that it fluctuates, and like all the mechanics of Hacker News, the precise rules are proprietary secret sauce.)

I think it might be 550 nowadays (I think I got it at that mark a couple of months ago)
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