[MichaelGG]

For a while, Firefox mobile would render different parts of HN's text in different sizes. At first I thought it was a mobile-only feature, but that would be odd for HN to do. Nope, turns out it was a Firefox table-something layout font issue. Seems fixed as of, perhaps 6 months ago?

Searching around also finds this answer pointing to a now-dead link saying Chrome used to have known issues with "consistent" fonts on sites like Reddit.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/19988987/27012

[ptx]

It is actually a feature, called "font inflation"[1], that tries to find the main content text on a site not designed for mobile and make it a readable size. It just wasn't doing a good job figuring out which parts were the content.

I would guess the recent improvement is due to the site itself being fixed – it now uses a "viewport" meta tag, which I don't think it did last year.

[1] http://www.jwir3.com/font-inflation-fennec-and-you/

[fixermark]

Yep. Features like this are basically why developing tightly-controlled UI experiences on the web are a garbage fire.

For a tightly-controlled UI experience, you want a thin, predictable framework that you can build your experience on top of. The web is the opposite of that. Big, big chunks of important detail for user experience are not specified in the RFCs and standards themselves.

Take CSS as an example. The first thing most web development frameworks will have you load is a CSS that sets the style for everything to some known defaults. If the web as an app development framework had been designed for a controllable experience, that would be unnecessary. But the web wasn't designed as an app development framework; it was designed as a heavily user-configurable presentation layer for standardized format of content.

[IanCal]

While I generally agree, I'm not surprised mobile browsers did weird things with HN. Look at the source, it's nested tables with expanded invisible 1 pixel gifs used for indentation.

[MichaelGG]

I've not designed HTML since the early 2000s but that was an easy, workable, way to do layout then and should still work now. HTML takes are just weird and require tricks like that to work. I understand the current preferred way is creating a grid via CSS.