looks in inspect element
Me: I stand corrected
There’s not just weird 90s style table layout/spacer gifs, there’s also just random font tags and inline color attributes for important (eg branding) elements. Every downvote greying is inline color attributes.
I’d originally planned on a companion stylesheet for Algolia search and it was so different I just bailed.
Edit: honestly given the forum, I wish they’d open source some portion of HN to allow improvement. I really want a better mobile view, which is easily achievable with CSS without using the API and hosting another domain. If there’s so little interest in UX improvement effort this is something we could pick up the slack on.
The text-browser point made by the OP is the first that ran into this however most text browsers don't render the current 'best practice' (using CSS classes with margins) correctly either.
Lots of people notice, like OP and anyone using assistive technologies. So by your logic, it is bad design.
Lists should be marked up as lists, tabular data marked up as tables. We ended this debate in...1996?
If comments are nested unordered lists, why isn't the best practice a bunch of ul and li tags styled with CSS?
There is no need to use exploratory programming for such matters; it is a very common and well understood problem for which there are good and bad solutions.
A simple `margin-left: 20px;` in CSS is a good solution; transparent spacing images are ridiculous.
Considering pg's background I don't think it's that.
You're wrong because you think the goal was to make a website.
Judging by the arclanguage.org post linked earlier, the goal was to test the Arc language as an example of exploratory programming to make a web application, with the measure of success being "as little Arc code as possible". The HTML output was intentionally 'bad' from a web development perspective, but 'good' from an Arc perspective. Consequently if you judge it purely in terms of web development it does look pretty awful, but that isn't the context it was written in so that's not a fair way to look at it.
Also, the goal clearly was to make a website, because pg made a website, and here we all are. Once you put your MVP online it's valid to criticize decisions made for it in that context.
It wasn't CSS that killed this manner of formatting visual content, circa 2005-2010. It was lawyers as it isn't friendly to accessibility.
That is the point, and that is why it was changed.
The markup should reflect the structure and meaning of the document, so that accessibility tools and crawlers might better understand it.
Ideally, with all CSS and Javascript turned off, it should look as a plain, white, unintereseting, but otherwise usable website.