I tried this for a few hours some time ago. It made the site less usable on most Android and iPhone devices with normal smartphone screen sizes. Text in a number of places ran together and comments shrunk to one character per line a few replies down.<p>So it's not that simple. Real changes to make the site truly responsive are larger and I can't promise they'll come soon.
I saw a comment on HN sometime back and can't seem to find it now, but thought it had some merit. The gist of it was that enabling posts from mobile might lead to lower content quality as typing on phones is tougher and we tend to focus on a quick reply rather than a thought out discussion.<p>I personally use <a href="http://hn.premii.com" rel="nofollow">http://hn.premii.com</a> on mobile & it has a good reading experience.
No, you cannot just add that to the top of a web page and have it magically transform into a mobile-friendly page. It may look fine on your particular device, but it will probably be completely hosed on everything else.<p>The viewport meta tag is essentially a switch which tells mobile browsers to <i>not</i> provide a default page width of 980px, auto zoomed out, but to instead use the device's CSS pixel dimensions, with a zoom you define with initial-scale. Note that this is not <i>physical</i> pixel dimensions. A mobile device's CSS pixels are the physical resolution divided by the device's devicePixelRatio, which currently can range from 1 to 3.<p>Examples:<p>On an iPhone 5s, which has a physical resolution of 1136x640 and a devicePixelRatio of 2, a viewport with "width=device-width" will create a page that only has 320px in portrait and 553px in landscape in CSS pixels.<p>On a HTC One, which has a physical resolution of 1920x1080 (1080p) and a devicePixelRatio of 3, the page will have only 360px in portrait and 640px in landscape.<p>On tablets, CSS pixel portrait width can range from 600px on a Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HDX, to 768px on an iPad mini non-retina, to 800px on a Nexus 10 or Kindle Fire HDX 8.9".<p>Using a viewport meta tag <i>needs</i> to be done in combination with CSS media queries (or a very flexible design that doesn't use px for sizes) to ensure that your web page design responds to the various screen sizes without breaking.<p>Hope that helps clarify things a bit - trust me, it's a common misunderstanding.
I am not sure what this is meant to address. The worst thing for mobile users is the teeny tiny voting buttons. I believe that votes are important and are not used enough and part of the reason is fear of accidental downvote.<p>The other thing that could be fixed is when someone puts a very long unbroken string in a comment without putting it in a code block. This makes the page very wide, and creates an unpleasant experience.
HN needs more than that - enabling it:<p><a href="http://imgur.com/9fetcE9" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/9fetcE9</a><p>Throw the template and CSS, and some sample data on GitHub. HN'd have a working version in 24 hours.
I have no idea as to the status of userscripts on mobile devices but at least on the desktop they are my go-to for personalizing my internet:<p><pre><code> ("news.ycombinator.com" === window.location.hostname) &&
(function () {
var meta = document.createElement("META");
meta.name = "viewport";
meta.content = "width=device-width, initial-scale=1";
if (document.readyState === "complete") {
document.head.appendChild(meta);
} else {
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
document.head.appendChild(meta);
});
}
})();</code></pre>
I use <a href="http://ihackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ihackernews.com/</a> all the time on mobile and it's working perfectly. Might want to give it a try!
I think we are all looking at the amount of work that would need to go into this, and not looking at the simple fact that maybe PG doesn't want to manage a mobile site.<p>If you don't understand what I mean by "manage", then consider yourself lucky as you have not worked in the digital agency world.
On other note -<p>Is there an extension/app for HN that categorizes the posts into topics (based on some text analysis) & enables the user to filter them out from the feed? Feature akin to what lobste.rs provides.<p>This will basically enable me to filter out fluff stories that manage to rise up.