[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Ask HN: Hacker News comment tree indentation on text-based web
       browsers?
        
       I noticed on every text-based web browser I've tried (lynx, links,
       w3m), hackernews comment threads do not maintain the correct
       indentation in the comment tree, collapsing all parent and children
       into a single list. Are there perhaps any easy fixes or
       workarounds, such as another text-based browser to try, or some
       other way to parse comment threads that maintains the correct
       indentation?
        
       Author : asdff
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2021-02-05 19:58 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
       | akalsz wrote:
       | w3m indents stuff correctly for me, using the version maintained
       | for Debian: http://github.com/tats/w3m
        
       | Kinnard wrote:
       | You should also post on the arc forum which shares code with HN:
       | http://arclang.com/forum
       | 
       | They're both written in arc by pg: http://www.arclanguage.org/
        
       | taviso wrote:
       | I don't know the answer to your question, but I see no reason I
       | couldn't add hn support to nntpit, if there was interest.
       | 
       | https://github.com/taviso/nntpit
        
       | yewenjie wrote:
       | HN uses a very non standard way to visually represent comment
       | trees -- transparent gifs of different widths instead of real
       | treelike data structures. The behavior of text based browsers is
       | understandable.
        
         | onion2k wrote:
         | That might be non-standard now but spacer gifs did _a lot_ of
         | the heavy lifting in website layout between about 1995 and
         | 2010.
        
           | krapp wrote:
           | The weird thing is, HTML already has (and had, even back
           | then) a much simpler and more straightforward way to
           | represent nested lists, but pg didn't want to use it because
           | he thought W3C recommendations went against the spirit of
           | explorational programming[0]. So the existing layout is the
           | way it is just to be contrarian... which is remarkably on-
           | brand for HN.
           | 
           | [0]http://arclanguage.org/item?id=20788
        
           | chc wrote:
           | While that's true, they haven't been commonly used for cases
           | like indenting child comments since the '90s. You'd usually
           | either indent with a table-based grid or with margin/padding
           | properties. The way Hacker News does it where every comment
           | is a table with a spacer gif in the first column was never a
           | common standard AFAIK.
        
         | abhisuri97 wrote:
         | Me: There's no way that's true
         | 
         |  _looks in inspect element_
         | 
         | Me: I stand corrected
        
         | akalsz wrote:
         | That makes sense then, w3m's inline image option was probably
         | disabled for OP and the other two can't inline images at all.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-02-05 23:00 UTC)