[danShumway]

> it just works.

Going to push back on this line specifically, HN has a number of issues. They're not dealbreakers, but they're also not particularly hard to fix with modern HTML. HN has generally kind of bad accessibility/semantics, it's pretty frustrating to use on mobile, and it degrades kind of poorly without Javascript (collapsing thread buttons still appear even though they don't work, also, collapsing thread buttons don't work without JS).

HN is (unironically) a great example of how kind of hacky you can make something and how little you can iterate on it while people still are mostly able to use it for its intended purpose. And (with the exception of maybe its blind accessibility problems) it should be held up as a great example of that.

But it's not a good example of "do things simply and they'll just work well." If anything, HN is a great example of why stuff like tables were abandoned. And the HTML isn't even that simple, this must have been a royal pain to build, everything everywhere is another embedded table. It's a weird dig at how bad some major websites have become that people don't see HN's HTML as bloated or convoluted.

Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution that makes parsing out and styling threads way harder than it needs to be. Seriously, I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make CSS selectors for custom user-styling work on child comments/replies on a site that is supposed to be displaying a comment tree in the DOM tree. There's a one-to-one mapping there, you don't really need a complicated visual slight-of-hand to display this information; just put the comments in the tree.

Again, not to get mad at HN; but I think people use it as a positive example in the wrong situations. HN has bad HTML with obvious downsides that would be pretty easy to fix, but it turns out that creating an elegant website and filing off the rough edges is actually a really small part of running a community, and doesn't matter that much in the long run when compared to other things you could be doing to foster that community (like moderation/curation), and that is a very good lesson for tech people to learn from HN. But nobody should praise the HTML on this site, there are much better examples out there on the web of sites that use simple HTML to great effect.

----

> (Applications are a different matter obviously)

Much more minor push-back but I actually would love to see more applications embrace the interactive document model even when fully native and fully offline. Not all applications, but a bunch of them. Stuff like calculators, calendars, even bigger applications like database software/image viewers/file browsers, etc...

User-accessible stylesheets for applications, user-accessible scraping tools for applications, etc... I think there's a lot of potential for user computing hidden behind a willingness to say, "no, many applications are just text displayed in tree/table form when you think about it, and the app/document divide was always sort of nonsense."

[duderific]

> Ever really dug into how HN threading works? Everything is a top-level comment, and it inserts transparent images to create the illusion of indentation. It's a wildly out-of-left-field solution...

Having worked on an implementation of comment indentation before, I think it's a technical design choice rather than wildly out of left field. From the backend perspective, it's more performant (and simpler from as far as code maintainability) to have a flat db table with a number representing indentation level, rather than have each comment point to its parent, and then have to recursively build the html.

When you're getting as much traffic as HN, such design tradeoffs can make a huge difference in site responsiveness.

[danShumway]

I might be misunderstanding what you're referring to. To be clear, I'm not really talking about recursively building anything about the HTML or fetching any additional data about other comments, or storing it in the database as a tree, a flat structure and iterative builds are fine for all of this. I'm talking about, purely off the top of my head, moving away from:

  result = reduce(comments, (result, comment) => {
    return result + build_comment(comment);
  }, '');

to:

  indent_level = 0;
  result = reduce(comments, (result, comment) => {
     missing_lvls = indent_level - comment.indent_level;
     close_str = missing_lvls > 0 ? repeat_str('</ul>', missing_lvls) : '';
     indent_level = comment.indent_level;

     return result + close_str + build_comment(comment);
  }, '');

I assume you're right and there's some kind of extra complexity somewhere, but HN isn't just storing the comments with no context other than indentation as far as I can tell. It is maintaining parent-child relationships at least well enough that the buttons to minimize/maximize threads work, so I am not sure what process is being skipped here by shipping flat HTML lists.

I guess I haven't ever read through HN's clientside Javascript, maybe it's calculating how to minimize threads on the fly completely clientside by iterating over the DOM, and maybe that's why the buttons don't work with JS disabled. But.. oof, I wouldn't hold that up as an example of good, simple clientside code if that's the case.

----

But again, I'm not going to argue with your conclusion, I assume there's something I've missed, I assume you're right.

This is still a bad example to use for "see, simple HTML is better". What you're describing is a good example of why it makes sense to say, "see, convoluted table setups that are worse on the client are faster overall than clean, simple output."

Which is not a bad lesson to learn from HN. It's a great lesson, sometimes performance requires us to do hacky things. But it is a very different lesson from where this thread started. You still would never point at that and say, "this is a good example of what HTML should look like", you would say, "these are the kinds of messy sacrifices that might be necessary to maintain a performant backend."

[danShumway]

> maybe it's calculating how to minimize threads on the fly completely clientside by iterating over the DOM, and maybe that's why the buttons don't work with JS disabled

Holy crud, I just opened the JS up and this is actually what it's doing. Heck me and my little 'not going to contradict you' statements, you might just be completely entirely right about what's going on I guess.

  function kidvis (tr, hide) {
    var n0 = ind(tr), n = ind(kid1(tr)), coll = false;
    if (n > n0) {
      while (tr = kid1(tr)) {
        if (ind(tr) <= n0) {

I'm still going to reassert that any architecture that leads to someone doing this kind of logic every time a button is pressed is neither simple nor elegant, and at best this is an example of making architectural sacrifices and introducing complexity for the sake of performance; there's no way that this kind of page logic is easier to maintain or to understand than something built around a more semantic structure.

It's also definitely not easier on the client, I've seen some comments on here argue that HN might use all this weird stuff to save client battery life, and I feel more confident now saying that's not the reason, because if someone is somehow, someway legitimately in some incredible situation where they're actually worried about the battery drain of a browser rendering a table vs a some extra CSS, then this is not the code you would want to run every single time you press a button on the page.

But yeah, the "we just base everything off of an indentation integer and comment order" theory does seem a lot more plausible to me now, because I'm having a somewhat difficult time thinking why else collapsing comments would work this way.