Re:Ask HN: Why HN is so ugly?
by krapp on Saturday April 19, 2014 @06:22PM
(#7614937)
>Bigger does not equal better.
It doesn't equal bloat either. But where typography is concerned, particularly on mobile, it can definitely equal "more legible." Readability should certainly be a concern on a forum. I would argue it should be one of the top concerns.
For instance, to me, the leading between lines here is way too small. That's an easy thing to fix.
>Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.
It would not tax anyone's mind to the breaking point to tell them what the character limit is, even assuming your latter statement tends to be correct. The ultimate expression of that philosophy is twitter anyway - longer comments are not necessarily worse, and a word limit doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.
>Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error
Actually, lists are already the lists of html. Tables are meant for rows and columns. Using them to show comment trees seems unnecessarily redundant because there's already an element for that.
Although, granted, that is the least important of the issues at hand.
It doesn't equal bloat either. But where typography is concerned, particularly on mobile, it can definitely equal "more legible." Readability should certainly be a concern on a forum. I would argue it should be one of the top concerns.
For instance, to me, the leading between lines here is way too small. That's an easy thing to fix.
>Not displaying unnecessary things reduces cognitive load. Anything that takes 2000 characters to express is something that could be reduced in length anyway.
It would not tax anyone's mind to the breaking point to tell them what the character limit is, even assuming your latter statement tends to be correct. The ultimate expression of that philosophy is twitter anyway - longer comments are not necessarily worse, and a word limit doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.
>Tables are the lists of html. The ambiguity they introduce is not always an error
Actually, lists are already the lists of html. Tables are meant for rows and columns. Using them to show comment trees seems unnecessarily redundant because there's already an element for that.
Although, granted, that is the least important of the issues at hand.