> HN is living proof.

of what? that you don't need a separate mobile site (or js) to show a most basic wall of text?

open up amazon.com or walmart.com and see how your justification holds up. certainly, there are simple layouts with sparse content that can be made responsive easily (blogs, image portfolios, etc) but this is a far cry from proof that a broad statement is at all applicable.

>of what? that you don't need a separate mobile site (or js) to show a most basic wall of text?

Most sites only need to show just that. And fail miserably at it.

>open up amazon.com or walmart.com and see how your justification holds up.

90% of sites are content based, not Amazon or Walmart. And even then could do with a much simpler layout.

Those are a pretty important 10%.

Fair enough. But how many sites on the internet that have special mobile sites are, at the end of the day, just showing walls of text?

I find this funny now because HN used to be awful on mobile, due to an inflexible tables-for-layout design. One that couldn't easily be changed, either, because everyone's clients relied on the exact structure of the markup for screen scraping.

I know it's a solved problem now, but:

> One that couldn't easily be changed, either, because everyone's clients relied on the exact structure of the markup for screen scraping.

This doesn't seem like that hard a problem. Presumably the robots all sent their own distinct UA strings (as scrapers only get written to imitate browser UA strings if you ban non-browser UA strings.) So why not just filter your logs to find all the known scrapers, serve anything with those exact UA strings "legacy" table-based responses, and serve everyone else the new layout?

Then you have to maintain two layouts in perpetuity.

Thankfully, this has been fixed.

There are plenty of ecommerce sites doing the mobile/desktop split generally well (and making millions of sales in the process). HN is literally text-only.

HN is terrible on mobile. Their column sizes are just slightly too big for my screen (not adaptive), so I have to scroll to read the last word of every line. And on desktop, it just expands to the whole page width, even through everyone knows you should never have a line of text that's longer than 600px.

Hackers they may be, web developers they are not.

HN has a mobile-only site, it was updated quite recently. It's been quite subtly done, but it's made upvoting and accessing comments a lot easier.

No, HN has a responsive layout - it works well on any screen size. (Well, hitting the correct arrow on mobile is still hard, but at least there's an undo button now).

Well it doesn't work very well on my phone. By the time I zoom enough to be able to read the text, its usually going way past the right hand side.

Use a browser that reflows text then and complain to the creators of your current browser that they don't support the integral feature for small screen web enjoyment.

HN is terrible on my iPhone 5S. Everything is way too small, it's extremely hard to tap on names, arrows or anything else except headlines.

For me it looks like this (on an S5 with Firefox for Android):

http://i.imgur.com/K6ov1pv.png

What does it look like for you? You might want to let [email protected] know.

It looks vaguely like that. Notice how all the menu links are clumped together? The same is true for all the action links anywhere eon the site. I may be old (38) and fat fingered, but I often will tap the wrong thing because they're just too close together and the targets are too small (plus they are text links, and not buttons.)

Actually reading text is not the worst part (though if I want to zoom at all then stuff scrolls off the page, since it won't reflow on iOS when you zoom, and browsing becomes miserable then.) The worst part is trying to interact with the site on mobile. I basically just don't do it.

Try zooming in to make the text larger for 40-year-old eyes. Doesn't work so great.

It is great on my Samsung Galaxy S. If I zoom in, long lines simply reflow to fit the screen. It means that I can dynamically adjust the font size to suit any accessibility needs or situation.

That's a pretty nice feature. Is there a browser on iOS which supports that? Safari and Chrome do not seem to reflow.

As far as I know Apple forbids people from using their own rendering engines so all you can get on ios are UI/UX differences.

Apple have an image to maintain. They don't want old people using iphones for web browsing.

Same for me on on iPhone 6 - comment text is tiny and I have to zoom in and to be sure of hitting controls accurately. Text does not reflow on zoom. :(

I use Firefox but it is the same with Safari.

Ik dont think responsive layouts is what he meant by mobile site.

That's correct for many websites, but others such as Facebook have such a complicated but still correct UI on a desktop that it's appropriate to have two different websites.

> correct UI on a desktop

Nope. That was true about a year ago, but not anymore. Facebook UI on a desktop is horrible. Try using it with 1024px wide screen - most apps/games aren't fully visible because they give 760px to the canvas and the rest of their UI is not responsive - so either the ad space on the right or the content (app/game) has to suffer.

It certainly needs more love - another problematic part is when you have messages open but you want to see stuff on the column to the right of the newsfeed. Its design leaves some to be desired.

I just discovered another problem today. You cannot paste text into chat (using latest Firefox stable on Mac OSX).