[tvanantwerp]

Today is the first day I've looked at the HTML for Hacker News. I feel like I've stepped into a time machine.

[iso8859-1]

Goes to show that you can be mobile friendly even with table based layouts! This is one argument against that I heard.

[stephenr]

I'd hardly call hacker news "mobile friendly". It's almost a cruel joke how unfriendly it is on mobile devices.

[paulddraper]

Spelling of time machines, you've also seen the UI.

(which, FYI, is functional though non-pretty, just like the HTML)

[nulbyte]

Well, there's a handful of seconds I will never get back.

[eudox]

Now I'm curious about the html op="item" bit.

[dang]

"op" is Arc's idiom for web request type, so that attribute makes it easy for a scraper to tell what kind of page it's looking at. We added it for a Chrome extension we wrote to help with moderation.

One of these years I want to open-source a stripped-down version of that Chrome extension, or better still make it an optional JS client that people can opt into. It's handy for browsing HN, if you like keyboard shortcuts and don't mind spawning tabs. Anybody know if there's a way for regular JS to spawn tabs, if the user is willing to give it the right permissions?