Plain html[ed] without any graphics would be a major improvement for hn on the phone. Even on the note3, which has about as big a screen as anything called a "phone" could reasonably have, it's pretty awful. It even manages to combine too small text with using too much of the screen/inducing scroll due too poor layout.
I'm not sure why nothing's ever done about it -- style aside hn has three serious usability problems: non-wrapping text, hopelessly small voting widgets ("up", "down" text buttons/links would be an improvement) -- and the comment box on mobile/small screens.
Am I correct in my understanding that there isn't a (current) public repo where one might suggest fixes for this? I really do enjoy the utilitarian "feel" to hn, but these long-standing issues really need to be fixed, and at least fixing the first two is quite easy.
[ed: by "plain html" I mean not simply wrapping the page in a table, and allowing a more normal view. Technically one could use the table markup and just change the css too, of course]
Last I looked, hn was built with functions that wrapped primitive/direct generation of html... I can't imagine it'd take that many replacements to change the structure to use a hierarchy of paragraph-tags or divs (ironically that might also be easier to style with parent-child relationships...).
But I didn't look very hard at the code last time I looked.
I'm not sure why nothing's ever done about it -- style aside hn has three serious usability problems: non-wrapping text, hopelessly small voting widgets ("up", "down" text buttons/links would be an improvement) -- and the comment box on mobile/small screens.
Am I correct in my understanding that there isn't a (current) public repo where one might suggest fixes for this? I really do enjoy the utilitarian "feel" to hn, but these long-standing issues really need to be fixed, and at least fixing the first two is quite easy.
[ed: by "plain html" I mean not simply wrapping the page in a table, and allowing a more normal view. Technically one could use the table markup and just change the css too, of course]