

Why Hacker news uses tables? - nikan

I had a quick look at the html of hacker news and saw tags that reminded me of how we made web pages 10 years ago. Why is this? Any particular rationale or just the good old 'if it works, don't fix it'?
======
drats
If you read the thread JeremyBanks points to, you can see that pg thinks it's
a waste of time to be hand crafting, to be optimising when it's already so
small and to be following recommendations beyond what is needed from standards
bodies.

More importantly it's about where you spend your time. Pg's a busy guy but HN
is good advertising for his business. He does spend time optimising the whole
thing though, technology _and_ community. Just look at the experiment, now
finished, to see whether displaying average comment scores would alter
community behaviour in a desirable way. These and the other tweaks - downvoted
comments fading toward background colour, the front page algorithm, the effect
of flagging and associated moderation, when people get voting rights - are the
things which improve the website. There are plenty of places and forums with
which are standards compliant and have a lot of seemingly whiz-bang features,
but their commentary sucks and their community has an aggressive tone and is
ridden with trolls. Too many people here think it's all about the technology
when there are other factors.

Even if pg held a "redesign HN" competition, to which many would respond for
free, reviewing the submissions and implementing the changes into the server
would be a waste of time compared to the opportunity cost of trying out
something else to improve the community and defend it against degradation.

~~~
rick_2047
I do think of HN as one big social experiment for PG. It seems he wants to
show reddit that the community does not have to degenerate after a number of
members (but of course reddit wanted to make money and they are).

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JeremyBanks
PG discussed this in this thread three years ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100595>

~~~
nikan
Thanks!

~~~
stralep
But 1. point, in this post, IMHO, is not completely resolved.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100699>

------
epo
Tables are good for _tabular_ data, they are also quick, easy and very cross-
platform, the semantic zealots seem to overlook this. Using tables to lay out
images or for a faux column effect is sloppy but really the whole table-hate
thing is overblown.

EDIT pg made the same comment about tabular data in the linked thread.

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kqueue
Using tables is not a bad thing. I don't know how people came to this
conclusion.

gmail lists emails using tables. What's wrong with that?

~~~
karanbhangui
Here we go again. A preemptive note on semantic HTML: This is not a question
of DIVs vs TABLEs. Those who litter DIVs everywhere are just as misguided. The
idea of HTML is to meaningfully represent the content it's describing.
Sometimes this means using tables (for tablular data), other times it involves
wrapping elements in a div container.

Now whether or not HN's front page is tabular data (my vote is not) is left to
debate.

~~~
alextgordon
How is a table with one column not meaningful? The meaning is obvious: it's a
list.

That HTML has specialist elements for lists is nice, but I don't see how that
implies that a table with one column isn't _also_ appropriate for a list.

~~~
karanbhangui
A table with one column may very well be appropriate, however that's not the
case here. A table has been used for layout. You will notice the up-vote icon
has its own cell for example. Not to mention, various deprecated style-related
tags like center are used as well.

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ludwigvan
I believe this is a question worth revisiting by pg, because the site doesn't
look good on mobile devices, even on the iPad.

Using css might make it easier through @media queries to adapt the site to
different devices (I actually only care that it looks good, so a table based
solution is actually fine with me), but nevertheless the site does need a
revision.

~~~
drats
HN works fine on my iPhone 3G, much better than those vile mobile sites which
somehow disable zooming.

edit: Another example, on reddit I have to use m.reddit.com to make it light
weight enough to be tolerable whereas HN works faster and more cleanly without
losing the capacity to vote and comment.

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photon_off
To me, I find it more limiting that child comments are not nested within their
parents. For example, implementing a show/hide children feature is annoyingly
difficult to do, as is showing trails leading to the parent. IIRC, all HN
comments are DOM siblings of each other.

I couldn't care less about divs vs tables or spacer images. However, I really
feel tree structured data should be encoded as such, especially when the
document itself is tree structured. It seems more difficult to do it
otherwise.

Not that it really matters that much. I have bookmarklets that add nesting and
trails, but it was just annoying to make them. I realize I'm an edge case, and
overall HN is hardly as impacted by it's markup as it is by the community.

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stretchwithme
Are you driving the exactly right car vehicle for you? Let's all figure it
out.

Of course, you have all of the information we'll require to make this
decision, so you'll have to answer all of our questions.

Oh, sure, we could just trust that understand the options and your own
specific situation and have already weighed everything and taken the path that
makes the most sense. But how would that be any fun?

------
RickHull
Hi, I made a quick mockup of HN's frontpage using semantic markup and CSS.
There are some issues as my CSS skills are not the greatest, but I think it's
a very good start.

<https://gist.github.com/719217>

