Oh, wow. HN really truncates that early. Those code blocks were narrower than the surrounding text, with no indication whatsoever that they were independently scrolling divs.

I get that HN is awfully bare-bones in its appearance, but this I think is a bit too far.

That is a problem with your browser not clearly indicating scrollable areas. Hacker News doesn't do anything special to prevent browsers from showing scrollbars.

But it doesn't do anything to force the scrollbars either, or to provide a visual treatment that indicates that this is an independent scrollable area. We've had iOS around for 6 years now, with its hidden-scrollbars approach, and OS X has followed the hidden-scrollbars approach for some time now as well. It is no longer acceptable to assume that scrollbars are necessarily going to be visible.

Hacker News does everything it is supposed to according to the CSS standard to indicate to your browser that the area is scrollable. In fact, it is obvious that the site is doing enough because the browser does in fact render the area as scrollable. The fact that your browser doesn't do anything to visually indicate when a region is an independent scrollable area is entirely Apple's fault.

You can argue that websites should be written to conform to the standards-violating behavior in Apple's browser rather than actual Web standards, but we already went through that with Microsoft in the '90s and early 2000s, and I don't think you'll find a lot of people who are eager to return to those days. Browser-makers are expected to conform to the standard, not vice-versa.

I am sympathetic to the fact that this is inconvenient, because I use Apple's software too. But it's Apple that's responsible for the inconvenience, not all the web designers who are correctly following the standard.

Hacker News does everything correctly to _functionally_ indicate that the area is scrollable. It does absolutely nothing to _visually_ indicate this. And the CSS spec does not require that the browser visually display scrollbars.

So no, Hacker News is in the wrong here. They're relying on the assumption that the user is using a browser that renders scrollbars, and providing a sub-par experience for any browser that does not. This is somewhat analogous to a site that only renders correctly in IE.

Huh. So do we build sites for users or to satisfy specs?

Do "we" make browsers to be usable, or to be pretty? If any random hack came up with that idea, it would be a random, hackish idea. But because it's Apple we have to abide? I dare say nahhhh...

HN's semantic markup isn't always great, but in this case it simply uses <pre> styled with overflow: auto.

> The behavior of the 'auto' value is user agent-dependent, but should cause a scrolling mechanism to be provided for overflowing boxes. — http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visufx.html#overflow

Apple's rendering is overly pretty to the point of being useless. They dropped support for a perfectly reasonable semantic requirement (make all the content available) which was in the spec literally before their browser existed.