> I find the greyed out comments very hard to read.
We recently changed it so that if you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it won't be greyed out anymore. Still an extra hop, but easier than it used to be.
(And thanks for responding so politely to dredmorbius' reminding you about the guideline.)
What? People online disagree about styling? That doesn't happen, does it? ;-)
Breaking that into a set of discreet changes some of which I should update ... ah, here's what I'm driving presently: http://pastebin.com/KhdhzY6b
1. Fonts styled in user default size preferences and specified in rem units. This addresses issues with scaling across displays with different dot pitch / pixel density. "html { font-size: medium; }"
2. Increased contrast between foreground and background. HN's margin / main body colors are pretty much precisely the inverse of what they ought to be.
3. Most of the rest of the changes are niggling. My own preferences, if you will (the stylesheet's primary consumer is: me). And it's no skin off nose what HN uses -- I've solved my problems.
But ... if I may, your response is "any change would annoy someone, so we can't change anything". I'm finding that ... curious coming from a tech/startup site.
I do appreciate HN's not hopping on the latest trend. I'm pretty underwhelmed by most online Web design (it's the problem, not the solution). But some principles borrowed from Readability / Instapaper / Pocket strike me as generally sane.
> if I may, your response is "any change would annoy someone, so we can't change anything". I'm finding that ... curious coming from a tech/startup site
HN isn't a startup. We're not after rapid growth. Indeed, rapid growth would kill the things we care about here.
I do understand why my comment sounded like your description, but that was an artifact of haste on my part rather than a true picture of what we think.
And I didn't mean to imply that HN/YC is a startup, but rather, a company that is steeped in the startup ethos. Part that's "growth", yes. But the other part is "build a better mousetrap".
Yeah, it uses explicit font sizing, but that's trivially zoomable, and the contrast works. These days I'd probably suggest they swap tables for a flat structure but CSS columns on a responsive design based on display width. Preferably in REMs, though that can have problems necessitating fallback methods:
Anyhow: I've made my pitch. You've seen it. I've got something that works for me. I think it might improve HN, but that's your call. Thanks for your time, and I appreciate pretty much all you do, particularly the editorial management/moderation on HN. S/N here has stayed quite good over the years.
We recently changed it so that if you click on a comment's timestamp to go to its page, it won't be greyed out anymore. Still an extra hop, but easier than it used to be.
(And thanks for responding so politely to dredmorbius' reminding you about the guideline.)