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by wizzwizz4 766 days ago
And if you make your page slightly bigger than the threshold for triggering HN's "mobile view", there's still padding in the top bar but the page is 53 pixels too wide, and you have to scroll horizontally. Hacker News is an example of why we don't use media queries to hack in a responsive layout. Websites are responsive by default, unless you're using <table> layouts (as HN does) or the <div>pocalypse (as every other website seems to, these days). Building different versions of your site for different widths is not a solution.

The more subtle things you describe seem quite sensible. I'll probably steal those ideas, if it comes up.
2 comments
skydhash 766 days ago
> Building different versions of your site for different widths is not a solution.

I think about it as building different sites for different form factor. What you do on a phone is different from what you do on a desktop. Or a tablet. I don't like using the amazon website on mobile because it's so cluttered, when what I want is usually searching for a product, or checking my cart for a product. I'm not managing my account in there, nor do I want alternative recommendations.

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wizzwizz4 765 days ago
What you do on a phone is different from what you do on a desktop. What if I want to do the "mobile" activities on a desktop, or zoomed in enough to trigger the viewport changes? What if I want to do the "desktop" activities on a mobile? If you want to make a separate mobile site, make a separate mobile site: don't use effective screen resolution as a proxy.
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zamadatix 766 days ago
Yeah, you can definitely fuck it up, but the same can be said for flex/grid/masonry layouts yet you wouldn't say "and grid spanning errors on resize are why we never use grid". HN does a lot "wrong" in its design (like the aforementioned table hell) but that doesn't mean every mistake it makes is a universal thing to avoid and inherent to the way it was implemented. Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, X, Amazon, and most modern sites do the same kind of content box snapping on either the header or content area (or both) via breakpoints. Most do it a lot better than HN :). The top site I know that doesn't really do that (but it does do the minor breakpoint things) is Yahoo.com.
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