Writing Less Code

Re:Writing Less Code by mintplant on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @02:49PM (#12307268)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Writing Less Code by derefr on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @07:59PM (#12309468)

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?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Writing Less Code by chasingtheflow on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @09:40PM (#12309884)

Then you have to maintain two layouts in perpetuity.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Writing Less Code by qwertyuiop924 on Wednesday August 17, 2016 @03:37PM (#12307690)

Thankfully, this has been fixed.

[ Parent | on HN ]