Posted by FromTheArchives 10/27/2025
I ran into this because I have a little userscript I inject everywhere that helps me copy text in hovered elements (not just links). It does:
[...document.querySelectorAll(":hover")].at(-1)
to grab the innermost hovered element. It works fine on standards-mode pages, but it's flaky on quirks-mode pages.
Question: is there any straightforward & clean way as a user to force a quirks-mode page to render in standards mode? I know you can do something like:
document.write("<!DOCTYPE html>" + document.documentElement.innerHTML);
but that blows away the entire document & introduces a ton of problems. Is there a cleaner trick?
At quick glance, it looks like they're still using the same CSS that was made public ~13 years ago:
https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...
Modern design trends are going backwards. Tons of spacing around everything, super low information density, designed for touch first (i.e. giant hit-targets), and tons of other things that were considered bad practice just ten years ago.
So HN has its quirks, but I'd take what it is over what most 20-something designers would turn it into. See old.reddit Vs. new.reddit or even their app.
perhaps try using a user agent that remembers your settings? e.g. firefox
To test, try setting your browser's font size larger or smaller and note which websites update and which do not. And besides helping to support different user preferences, it's very useful for accessibility.
[1] After testing, it looks like the "Reply" and "Help" links respect large browser font sizes.
None of the ”content needs white space and large fonts to breathe“ stuff or having to click to see a reply like on other sites. That just complicates interactions.
And I am posting this on an iPhone SE while my sight has started to degrade from age.
HN is the only site I have to increase the zoom level, and others below are doing the same thing as me. But it must be us with the issues. Obviously PG knew best in 2006 for decades to come.
16px is just massive.
HN has a good amount of white space. Much more would be too much, much less would be not enough.
1920x1080 24" screen here, .274mm pitch which is just about 100dpi. Standard text size in HN is also about 2mm across, measured by the simple method of holding a ruler up to the screen and guessing.
If you can't read this, you maybe need to get your eyes checked. It's likely you need reading glasses. The need for reading glasses kind of crept up on me because I either work on kind of Landrover-engine-scale components, or grain-of-sugar-scale components, the latter viewed down a binocular microscope on my SMD rework bench and the former big enough to see quite easily ;-)
On what devices (or browsers?) it renders "insanely small" for you? CSS pixels are not physical pixels, they're scaled to 1/96th of an inch on desktop computers, for smartphones etc. scaling takes into account the shorter typical distance between your eyes and the screen (to make the angular size roughly the same), so one CSS pixel can span multiple physical pixels on a high-PPI display. Font size specified in px should look the same on various devices. HN font size feels the same for me on my 32" 4k display (137 PPI), my 24" display with 94 PPI, and on my smartphone (416 PPI).
It has been changed since then for sure though. A couple of years ago the mobile experience was way worse than what it is today, so something has clearly changed. I think also some infamous "non-wrapping inline code" bug in the CSS was fixed, but can't remember if that was months, years or decades ago.
On another note, they're very receptive to emails, and if you have specific things you want fixed, and maybe even ideas on how to do in a good and proper way, you can email them (hn@ycombinator.com) and they'll respond relatively fast, either with a "thanks, good idea" or "probably not, here's why". That has been my experience at least.
On mobile it’s fine, on Mac with a Retina display it’s fine; the only one where it isn’t is a 4K display rendering at native resolution - for that, I have my browser set to 110% zoom, which is perfect for me.
So I have a workaround that’s trivial, but I can see the benefit of not needing to do that.
There is no such thing as a reasonable default size if we stop calibrating to physical dimensions. If you choose to use your phone at a scaling where what is supposed to be 1" is 0.75" then that's on you, not on the website to up the font size for everyone.
There's a trend to make fonts bigger but I never understood why. Do people really have trouble reading it?
I prefer seeing more information at the same time, when I used Discord (on PC), I even switched to IRC mode and made the font smaller so that more text would fit.
I'm not asking for some major, crazy redesign. 16px is the browser default and most websites aren't using tiny, small font sizes like 12px any longer.
The only reason HN is using it is because `pg` made it that in 2006, at a time when it was normal and made sense.
Maybe the issue is not scaling according to DPI?
OTOH, people with 30+ inch screens probably sit a bit further away to be able to see everything without moving their head so it makes sense that even sites which take DPI into account use larger fonts because it's not really about how large something is physically on the screen but about the angular size relative to the eye.
I don't really have to do the same elsewhere, so I think the 12px font might be just a bit too small for modern 4k devices.
The better option is to create and hold a reference to the old nodes (as easy as `var old = document.documentElement`) and then after blowing everything away with document.write (with an empty* html element; don't serialize the whole tree), re-insert them under the new document.documentElement.
* Note that your approach doesn't preserve the attributes on the html element; you can fix this by either pro-actively removing the child nodes before the document.write call and rely on document.documentElement.outerHTML to serialize the attributes just as in the original, or you can iterate through the old element's attributes and re-set them one-by-one.
No need to have the default be compatible with a dead browser.
further thoughts: I just read the mdn quirks page and perhaps I will start shipping Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml as I don't really like putting the doctype in. It is the one screwball tag and requires special casing in my otherwise elegant html output engine.
<div id="root"></div>
<script src="bundle.js"></script>
<main>...</main>
Navigation should come early in document and tab order. Screen readers have shortcuts for quickly jumping around the page and skipping things. It's a normal part of the user experience. Some screen readers and settings de-prioritize navigation elements in favor of reading headings quickly, so if you don't hear the navigation right away, it's not necessarily a bug, and there's a shortcut to get to it. The most important thing to test is whether the screen reader says what you expect it to for dynamic and complex components, such as buttons and forms, e.g. does it communicate progress, errors, and success? It's usually pretty easy to implement, but this is where many apps mess up.
Correction: each screen reader + os + browser combo does things a bit differently, especially on multilanguage React sites. It is a full time job to test web sites on screen readers.
If only there was a tool that would comprehensively test all combos on all navigation styles (mouse, touch, tabbing, screen reader controls, sip and puff joysticks, chin joysticks, eye trackers, Braille terminals, etc)… but there isn’t one.
Doesn’t hit everything but it can run real device screen reader automated tests
I remember HTML has an way to create global shortcuts inside a page, so you press a key combination and the cursor moves directly to a pre-defined place. If I remember that right, it's recommended to add some of those pointing to the menu, the main content, and whatever other relevant area you have.
I'm…missing the joke – could someone explain, please? Thank you.
This is now "standard" but breaks any browser that doesn't (or can't) support javascript. It's also a nightmare for SEO, accessibility and many other things (like your memory, cpu and battery usage).
But hey, it's "modern"!
Edit: In the `minify-html` Rust crate you can specify "enable_possibly_noncompliant", which leads to such things. They are exploiting the fact that HTML parsers have to accept this per the (parsing) spec even though it's not valid HTML according to the (authoring) spec.
[0] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parse-er...
Ah, that's what I was missing. Thanks! The relevant part of the spec:
> user agents, while parsing an HTML document, may abort the parser at the first parse error that they encounter for which they do not wish to apply the rules described in this specification.
(https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#parse-er...)
https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/blob/main/dist/ind...
Maybe the name was never about the Metaverse at all...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_standard
> A technical standard may be developed privately or unilaterally, for example by a corporation, regulatory body, military, etc.
PDF is now an international standard (ISO 32000) but it was invented by Adobe. HTML was invented at the CERN and is now controlled by W3C (a private consortium). OpenGL was created by SGI and is maintained by the Khronos Group.
All had different "ownership" paths and yet I'd say all of them are standards.
I probably should not admit this, but I have been using Lit Elements with raw JavaScript code. Because I stopped using autocomplete awhile ago.
I guess not using TypeScript at this point is basically the equivalent for many people these days of saying that I use punch cards.
[0]: https://basecamp.com/ [1]: https://stimulus.hotwired.dev/
It's also more complex to do JS builds in Ruby when Ruby isn't up to the task of doing builds performantly and the only good option is calling out to other binaries. That can also be viewed from the outside as "we painted ourselves into a corner, and now we will discuss the virtues of standing in corners". Compared to Bun, this feels like a dated perspective.
DHH has had a lot of opinions, he's not wrong on many things but he's also not universally right for all scenarios either and the world moved past him back in like 2010.
But regardless, I didn't mean to make any argument for or against this, I'm saying this was one of the points DHH made at some point.
I'm old enough to have a first hand experience of building a Flash website that required to load couple hundred tiny xml files for configuration only to find out that some ~300kb was taking couple of minutes to load because of limited connection pool in old http.
Back then bundling and overly complicated build steps were not yet invented, so instead of serving one large XML (which would work out of the box, as there was a root xml and certain nodes instead of having data were linking to external files) I quickly decided to implement zip compression and bundle the package that way.
Fast forward to 2025 when most devs need an external library to check if number isEven and the simplest project need a toolchain that's more complicated that the whole Apollo project.
I very much enjoy writing no-build, plain vanilla JS for the sake of simplicity and ability to simply launch a project by dragging HTML file onto a browser. Not to mention the power of making changes with notepad instead of needing whole toolchain on your system.
Yes! not only that but without ShadowDOM as well.
Even frameworks with more dependencies bundling/vendoring just your dependencies at package upgrade time and using an importmap to load them is a good experience.
I'm not giving up Typescript at this point, but Typescript configured to modern `"target"` options where it is doing mostly just type stripping is a good experience, especially in a simple `--watch` loop.
I could never.
I was introduced to this decision from the Lex Fridman/DHH podcast. He talked a lot about typescript making meta programming very hard. I can see how that would be the case but I don't really understand what sort of meta programming you can do with JS. The general dynamic-ness of it I get.
My browser window is 2560x1487. 80% of the screen is blank. I have to zoom in 170% to read the content. With older blogs, I don't have this issue, it just works. Is it on purpose or it is it bad css? Given the title of the post, i think this is somewhat relevant.
From a functional standpoint: Having to scan your eyes left to right a far distance to read makes it more uncomfortable. Of course, you could debate this and I'm sure there are user preferences, but this is the idea behind limiting the content width.
From a stylistic standpoint: It just looks “bad” if text goes all the way from the left to right because the paragraph looks "too thin" like "not enough volume" and "too much whitespace." It’s about achieving a ratio of background to text that’s visually pleasurable. With really wide widths, paragraphs can end really early on the left, leaving their last lines really “naked” where you see all this whitespace inconsistently following some paragraphs. I can't really explain why this looks bad any further though. It’s kind of like picking colors combinations, the deciding factor isn't any rule: it's just "does it look pretty?"
In the case of the site in question, the content width is really small. However, if you notice, each paragraph has very few words so it may have been tightened up for style reasons. I would have made the same choice.
That said, if you have to zoom in 170% to read the content and everything else is not also tiny on your screen, it may be bad CSS.
I get not having read all the way to the end and back, I even get having margins, but it should be relative to the screen size. Fixed width is the issue I think. To avoid paragraphs looking too thin, maybe increasing the font relative to the screen size makes sense? I'd think there is a way to specify a reference screen resolution to the browser so that it can auto increase the font sizes and/or adjust the div's width.
--step-0: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0739rem + 0.2273vw, 1.25rem);
Another method I like to use is to adjust the amount of words per paragraph depending on the medium. I will literally write more or less just to attain my personal favorite of 3-6 visual lines per paragraph.
Or sometimes I will more readily join paragraphs or split them more often in a text just to achieve my target.
Decreasing width is actually just really easy and also works really well when the type of content can vary.
All of this seems like some serious overkill attention to detail I know, but I guess it's a big deal for some people. For example, most people don't really care about dressing nice regularly anymore when they get older and marry because it frankly doesn't matter anymore (and they're totally right), but people who like fashion still care up until the end.
This wouldn't be the first thing I'm just weird about. Similarly, I find reading justified text to be just horrible, as I constantly lose track of what line I'm on. This one I believe has been debunked and raised as a genuine accessibility concern, but not all parts of the world have gotten around to recognising that. I'm also not a fan of serifed fonts, even in books. I'm not sure if there have been any studies made about that, as the serifs are supposed to be there to aid reading when printed on paper, but I consistently find a good sans-serif font to be better in all cases.
If Wikipedia had 70 characters per line I would never read it.
It's rare to see a site as popular as HN which has made almost zero changes to the UI over its entire history.
Kinda like how HackerNews is, it's centered and doesn't scale to my full width of the monitor.
You would think browsers themselves would handle the rest, if the website simply specified "center the content div with 60% width" or something like that.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
Where do the standards say it ought to work?
<meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark">
s/lange/lang/
> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
Don’t need the “.0”. In fact, the atrocious incomplete spec of this stuff <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-viewport-1/> specifies using strtod to parse the number, which is locale dependent, so in theory on a locale that uses a different decimal separator (e.g. French), the “.0” will be ignored.
I have yet to test whether <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.5"> misbehaves (parsing as 1 instead of 1½) with LC_NUMERIC=fr_FR.UTF-8 on any user agents.
And it's really irritating when you have the computer read something out to you that contains numbers. 53.1 km reads like you expect but 53,1 km becomes "fifty-three (long pause) one kilometer".
This makes a lot of sense when you recognize that Excel formulas, unlike proper programming languages, aren't necessarily written by people with a sufficient grasp of the English language, especially when it comes to more abstract mathematical concepts, which aren't taught in secondary English language classes at school, but it in their native language mathematics classes.
The day I found that Intellij has a built in CSV tabular editor and viewer was the best day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...