Really, some fairly high percentage of readers must be reading on mobile. I can tell YC is committed to keeping the site simple as possible but 30 minutes of work would save actual man-hours of zooming in 500% in order to click that astoundingly tiny arrow.
Although Firefox seems to ignore media queries that don't have a medium type (just using `@media all and (max-...) { .. }` fixes that though), and using the prefix search of `a[id^="up_"]` is probably more efficient than the full substring search of `id*="up_"`.
Just sticking this at the end of the CSS file seems to help (obviously the 800px could be adjusted downward if that is deemed too wide for filtering mobile devices):
@media screen and (max-width: 800px), handheld and (max-width: 800px) {
img[src="grayarrow.gif"], img[src="graydown.gif"] {
width: 20px;
height: 20px;
}
}
Yes, it would be really hard. For as much as I love HN, I think it does not stand to the standards of what it is: a meeting place for hackers.
When we work on the web, we focus on being semantic, conscious about the actual web in which one size does not fit all, usability and design. None of which HN has: tables, it doesn't work on mobile (and the links on the submission aren't clickable) and you can't undo your vote. I understand another hacker value is protoyping and MVP-thinking, but when you have a vibrant community a few years old, that's not the case.
Maybe the hacker thinking on HN is doing it yourself, maybe you can come up with a browser extension that fixes this stuff.
In the meanwhile, you can use ihackernews.com for when you're on the go.
On the DIY note, it would be pretty trivial to create a personalized version of Hacker News using Moovweb. Move a little HTML around, add your own CSS, bam -> mobilized hacker news to your customization.
HN looks like it was hacked overnight which makes its design perfectly adequate for a community of hacker...
Something becomes a standard when used by the majority. In this case it would be reasonable to make HN's unpolished design the standard for communities of hackers...
edit: I just realized you are talking about not being able to vote on things easily- sadly you cant do that with hackerwebapp, but it is still a really good mobile site.
I only browse hn using ihackernews now. I feel like im cheating every time I do, but I have accepted this well executed solution to the problem of hn on mobile rather than waste my energy trying to convince strangers to alter their site.
I've always thought that we need to make it very easy for HN:
somebody, please post some CSS that is short, simple and does the job; so simple and elegant that they will have no choice but to copy and paste it into the news.css file.
EDIT: dbaupp did something while I was writing this. Great.
I think that would be great! Personally I use the news:yc [1] app on iPhone (no affiliation). It works well and the author updates it when there is a parsing problem.
You're better off just using one of the many great mobile-optimized versions of HN out there. I don't think HN will ever have a mobile version, although I would love to be proven wrong.
The main problem is HN looks like a science project to me and has proven that arc can be used to power a site like this.
It works and thats probably enough for pg right now :)
Yes, it works. But it's not up to what it should be its standard. Also, what is the repo good for if it's not official and it has no chance in being put that into production?
I didn't make the fonts scale to mobile screen ratio because I know a lot of people like to have the ability to pinch in and out.
PG, if you're reading this, all you have to do is dump this at the bottom of your css file.
End result is this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/t2893r570ef429t/hn-css.jpg