Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-based web browsers?

Re:Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-base... by Blikkentrekker on Friday February 05, 2021 @06:43PM (#26042607)

If the domain not be well understood when one is crafting the markup for a layout as simple as Hacker News's, one simply lacks even the most basic experience.

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-base... by onion2k on Saturday February 06, 2021 @02:47AM (#26044920)

one simply lacks even the most basic experience

Considering pg's background I don't think it's that.

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Re:Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-base... by Blikkentrekker on Saturday February 06, 2021 @04:49AM (#26045465)

Which is why I believe that the domain was quite well understood, and that exploratory programming to generate the markup for this simple website is a mistake.

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Re:Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-base... by onion2k on Saturday February 06, 2021 @05:56AM (#26045729)

exploratory programming to generate the markup for this simple website is a mistake

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.

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Re:Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-base... by krapp on Saturday February 06, 2021 @08:26AM (#26046341)

Tables and spacer gifs don't necessarily use less Arc code than a simpler layout would. The table layout might even use a bit more if it requires more iteration, macro expansion and branching to render. There are special case macros in the html library for generating parts of the forum table that wouldn't be necessary otherwise.

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.

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