LWN: Comments on "Touring the hidden corners of LWN"

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

sethml — Sat, 23 May 2015 16:12:24 +0000

Yes yes yes!

Also useful for browsing difficult comment threads on a small screen would be "up", "next", and "previous" links on comments, which would scroll to the parent, sibling, and prior comments, respectively. I often find myself buried in reading some flame war or a discussion of the minutiae of the history of some kernel bug, and decide I'd like to move on. With scrolling links, this would be easy: hit "up" until I find the responsible parent comment, then hit "next". As it stands, I have to scroll while judging from indentation when I've escaped the uninteresting section - almost impossible.

Links would be easy to implement with anchors for each comment, and I think would eliminate much of the need for collapsible comments.

Sidebar background

Brenner — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 09:49:59 +0000

Indeed, #ffcc99 in the "Left column color w/new page engine" is much better !

PS:
This comment mostly there so that I can find it later easily in my "Comments you have posted" list.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

nix — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:27:04 +0000

Yeah, but either sites have to apply this themselves (which none of them do) or you have to override everything with a custom stylesheet (which smashes a lot of sites into screaming flinders). I wish there was a better way...

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

nix — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:24:12 +0000

The 'Stylish' browser extension for Chrome and firefox has a 'Dark LWN' theme in its style library.

RSS https

Darkmere — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 10:28:21 +0000

Personally I'd hope for something like
$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i s/http:/https:/g

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

jschrod — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 02:19:20 +0000

> You should not be using Windows XP, and you should not be using IE 8.

"You should not be using Windows XP, and you should not be using IE 8, for reading lwn.net"

FTFY.

There are lots of reasons to use XP and IE8. Almost all of them have to do with the fact that people still use it and one wants to have a test environment to observe their experience. I have dozens of such VMs lying around and I need them badly.

That said, a reason to use such environments outside virtual machines that don't connect to the Internet -- well, that's hard to find.

What I want to communicate: reality aint't that black-and-white. You have to ask for the context first; then you can make assertions like you did.

RSS https

intgr — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:40:44 +0000

Same with "subscriber links"

Any comment thread collapse?

cdmiller — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 22:57:01 +0000

One thing that would be nice IMO is the ability to collapse any thread, not just the filtered ones.

I'm sure you hear this all the time, but thanks for all the great work over the years by LWN. The approach of concentrating on the quality of content before all else is much appreciated.

HTTP redirection

nye — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 16:47:11 +0000

>SSL was trademarked to Netscape, when it became a standard for more than a single vendor, it had to change the name, to TLS instead

[citation needed]

I can find only one other reference to this, an off-hand comment without citation http://technotes-fran.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/ssls-dirty-l...); it's not mentioned at all on the Wiki page for SSL or TLS.

Additionally, a search of the USPTO's trademark database comes up with nothing relevant (though there are a lot of more recent trademarks *containing* SSL), which leads me to conclude tentatively that this is probably not true.

HTTP redirection

robbe — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 16:25:25 +0000

That explains why it was called TLS. But giving it a 1.0 version was certainly dumb.

I can't imagine though, that the trademark has survived.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

mina86 — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 15:08:37 +0000

OK, nvm. I've noticed the menu button in bottom left.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

jani — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:35:26 +0000

Chrome on Nexus 4, the menu on the left (when popped up using the button) gets cropped from the left using the new page engine. Seems to be related to Settings | Accessibility | Text scaling option, which I've set to 125%. (Even with that set back to default 100% the menu starts at the very edge of the screen, with zero padding.)

Mark read comment

jani — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:28:46 +0000

That's a feature I've been looking for in the article view, highlighting of all messages that would show up in http://lwn.net/Comments/unread.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

mina86 — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 12:25:33 +0000

Am I blind or did mobile version loose “go to previous edition” and “go to following edition” links? For me those are a must since otherwise I seem to be forced to go through the Archive which is many more clicks and scrolls.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

gidoca — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 10:05:21 +0000

Chrome for Android also has this effect, see this screenshot.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

lsl — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 06:20:50 +0000

> You pull your browser window wide because you want it to fill the whole screen -- but of course on widescreen monitors that means large margins or horribly hard-to-read text.

Yeah, but why do you want it to fill the whole screen when all it results in is pain? Open another window and make them fill the screen together. If you can't think of anything to put in the other half of the screen just make it an additional browser window. It will fill itself in the course of a browsing session.☺

IE 8

lsl — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 06:04:26 +0000

> More seriously: I guess this very much depends on how demanding/picky you are. I don't think supporting a browser version is a black or white question. I doubt the site is completely unreadable in IE8 as it is right now, or is it?

From time to time I visit LWN using Tom Duff's Mothra as my user agent. It looks very different from LWN in most other browsers but you can actually read the articles (and navigate the site!) just fine, albeit somewhat quirky. So no, it's not a binary decision, except maybe for websites that require tons of javascript to even load the page.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

Seegras — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 22:34:50 +0000

> The right fourth or so of the screen is entirely blank (1920x1080, 12"
> screen), no matter what text zoom. I don't understand why.

Monitors are bloody well not made so you can spread text beyond the borders of anything sane. And in case of text, its supposed to be where your eyes are, and not that you need to constantly move your head. 1920x1080 is made for movies, not text, and as it happens you've got resizeable windows, so you can spread text to more natural dimensions.

I read LWN in a format that's natural and nice to read, namely 1:1.681, also known as golden ratio.

And this leaves space for terminals on the side of the browser window as well, which is most probably as K&R intended ;).

So if your browser window is in anything but the golden ratio dimension, you're obviously doing it wrong, and you shall live in a hell of bad typography (I'm pretty sure you also think Arial is nice, and Comic Sans looks good) and bad layout.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

cesarb — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 13:26:03 +0000

> The *right* solution would be for web browsers to learn how to produce multicolumn text output on the fly, as needed.

You mean "column-count: auto"? http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

nye — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 13:05:03 +0000

I don't disagree with the general idea behind your post, but I feel I have to make a factual correction:

>You should not be using Windows XP, and you should not be using IE 8.
>Both are not supported any more, which means you would be irresponsibly putting yourself and others at risk.

Not only is IE8 still supported, it will remain supported until 2020.

In fact, even IE*6* is still supported for a few months more, though only on Server 2003.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

tpetazzoni — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 12:20:51 +0000

This is indeed simpler, but still I'd have to run this a cronjob. LWN could be running this instead, and send the result to the @kindle.com address of interested subscribers.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

nix — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 11:19:04 +0000

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why do you need a whole recipe when

ebook-convert "LWN.net Weekly Edition.recipe" ~/tmp/conversion/lwn-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").mobi --output-profile=kindle --username=$USERNAME --password=$PASSWORD --keep-ligatures --smarten-punctuation && calibre-smtp -a ~/tmp/conversion/lwn-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").mobi -s "LWN subscription" -r $MAILSERVER -p 25 -e NONE my@email.address my.kindle.address@free.kindle.com

will do?

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

nix — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 11:16:31 +0000

You pull your browser window wide because you want it to fill the whole screen -- but of course on widescreen monitors that means large margins or horribly hard-to-read text.

The *right* solution would be for web browsers to learn how to produce multicolumn text output on the fly, as needed. But that's hard...

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

Seegras — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 08:14:36 +0000

You should not be using Windows XP, and you should not be using IE 8.

Both are not supported any more, which means you would be irresponsibly putting yourself and others at risk.

Furthermore, IE8 can't do forward secrecy if you don't support some very stupid ciphers in your https configuration (IE6, by the way, can only do SSLv3, which should be turned off anyway). But there are other browsers that work on XP and Vista.

And if your company policy insists on XP and IE, you should be working somewhere else. Because such a company policy, like mandating that company cars must not be fitted with safety belts, shouldn't have survived your starting to work there ;)

Really, lwn should not make any efforts to support such old and broken browsers.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

eru — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 06:47:52 +0000

Since you seem to have IE8, how does the new site look with it for the moment?

Readable, but the left sidebar disappears completely.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

rodgerd — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 04:17:07 +0000

> I think how you feel about supporting obsolete versions of Internet Explorer corresponds strongly with how much of your life you've spent doing browser-based development.

More than I care to think about, and in the era of Navigator 4 and IE 4 and 5.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

b3nj4m — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 01:44:32 +0000

Commonly known as the "Android stock browser".

IE 8

marcH — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:43:29 +0000

> With luck it shouldn't be too hard.

Famous last words!

More seriously: I guess this very much depends on how demanding/picky you are. I don't think supporting a browser version is a black or white question. I doubt the site is completely unreadable in IE8 as it is right now, or is it?

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

k8to — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 23:01:13 +0000

I think how you feel about supporting obsolete versions of Internet Explorer corresponds strongly with how much of your life you've spent doing browser-based development. I rather expect those who have done it as their main job for years would feel it's not worth bothering. If only from wanting to spare others from the pain.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

k8to — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 22:57:25 +0000

I also get the blank right side. At the moment, fwiw, I'm running Firefox 33.1.1 on os x 10.8.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

dlang — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 21:35:20 +0000

has anyone put together a reverse color scheme? the office I work in is rather dark and I would prefer white text on a back background, but with so many different colors to set I haven't gone through to figure out a set that work.

It would be handy if that page had a sample that refreshed with the different colors as you set them rather than having to refresh the entire page (and potentially end up with a color scheme that makes it really hard to see what's what to fix)

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

utoddl — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 21:24:53 +0000

I would particularly like to see an option to pick a serif font vs sans-serif font. Font preference surely varies greatly among users, but I find the sans-serif particularly harder to read. (There's a reason my browser has a default font, and my default is not sans-serif.)

IE 8

corbet — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 20:03:03 +0000

FWIW, I would rather people were able to read LWN even if they're somehow stuck with a nasty old browser that takes extra effort to support. The fact that it isn't working yet makes it clear where this sits on the priority list, but I do intend to make it work before too long. With luck it shouldn't be too hard.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

flussence — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 19:25:51 +0000

No, LWN (or any other site) should *not* be wasting its time catering to an obsolete, broken-at-release version of a Microsoft browser, especially not one that currently requires extra effort to inflict on oneself. That you're even trying to argue the contrary position is absurd.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

marcH — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 17:42:20 +0000

> From browsing support pages, I have come to the conclusion it comes down to its graphics chip. Takes Microsoft to create a browser with this kind of HW dependency!

Graphics seems to have been an highlight of the release version 9, however HW acceleration does not seems to be mandatory, at least not in theory: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2528233

Maybe the installer requires HW acceleration and you can't disable HW acceleration until you've installed :-)

Since you seem to have IE8, how does the new site look with it for the moment?

Comment filtering

dskoll — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 17:25:08 +0000

Sorry, my bad. Comment filtering does work. I plead pre-coffee dementia...

Comment filtering

jake — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 16:43:04 +0000

> Could you enable comment filtering for members of a corporate group subscription?

Hmm. If comment filtering is not available for members of a group subscription, that's a bug. We certainly intend it to be and I would be surprised if it isn't, since we would likely have gotten a complaint or two along the way.

Can you send us the details to the lwn alias here at lwn.net?

thanks,

jake

Comment filtering

dskoll — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 16:18:24 +0000

Could you enable comment filtering for members of a corporate group subscription? Pretty please?

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

rodgerd — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:16:47 +0000

Because clearly complaining Jon shouldn't make lwn usable in particular browser/OS combos isn't excluding people.

Touring the hidden corners of LWN

jzb — Mon, 01 Dec 2014 12:09:22 +0000

One feature I'd love to see one day - the ability to collapse a thread of comments. Sometimes a single comment spawns a really, really long thread of discussion I've no interest in - would love to be able to collapse that and move on to the next. (Not so bad on a desktop, but less fun on mobile.)