[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)