Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olavk | Hacker News Reader

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For the first question, there are 12 answers providing pure CSS solutions. One of them is marked as accepted by the OP, which indicates it solved their problem.

Then there is a single comment (not an answer) which says "you are not supposed to do that", which have received a single upvote.

You say "people won't bother", but in reality, 12 people have bothered and provided detailed solutions with code. What more could you want?

I don't really see the major problem here.

The second question has 23 answers, the top one having 186 upvotes. And then there is a single comment (not an answer), saying JS is more appropriate for this, and a reply from the OP explaining why it needs to be pure CSS.

Comments are for asking questions, request clarifications and providing information which does not constitute a regular answer. This seems to work exactly as intended. Several answers make it clear that the CSS solution is more fragile and worse supported than a JS solution, so I think it is pretty relevant to ask the OP (absent any information either way) if they couldn't use JS instead.

I really have a hard time seeing the problem here?

> Then there is a single comment (not an answer) which says "you are not supposed to do that", which have received a single upvote.

This comment should be deleted as it's blatantly off-topic and a waste of time. OK, let's forget about question one, since I found it in two seconds.

> Comments are for asking questions, request clarifications and providing information which does not constitute a regular answer.

> Several answers make it clear that the CSS solution is more fragile and worse supported than a JS solution

As you say here, the questioning ("clarification") of the question isn't limited to comments. It's easy to mentally ignore comments, but when you have to read through half an answer just to get past the BS... and besides, the CSS solutions in that thread certainly are fragile and bad, but that has nothing to do with CSS being appropriate or not and more because the answers are, well, terrible. CSS is perfectly capable of doing what the question asked for in a robust manner, and it avoids changing the page on-load which is a bad user experience (not that any web developers actually care...) and certainly no less fragile (assuming JS is even turned on in the user's browser).

The problem is people telling others what they should do, and I don't want random people trying to dictate what I should be doing -- especially not people giving answers like those. Actually, a couple of the answers are OK, and somewhat explanatory, but the rest are just BS that throw code at you, which is useless and a waste of everyone's time. To be fair, web development answers on SO are the lowest-quality generally speaking. I'm pretty satisfied with using SO for answers about e.g. Emacs.

> I really have a hard time seeing the problem here?

Uh, seriously?

I don't follow - are you saying you know of a better solution than the ones proposed in the thread? And you are angry that this better solution is not already posted?

It's worth emphasizing that for the first example, the answer was provided free of charge within an hour. I don't think I agree with any assessment in which this is not an unqualified success.

> It's worth emphasizing that for the first example, the answer was provided free of charge within an hour.

It shows -- the quality of the answer is quite poor.

> I don't think I agree with any assessment in which this is not an unqualified success.

This made me laugh. I guess the only assessment you considered is your own, which simplistically assumed time to answer is the most important factor.

And yet, not a single soul finding this question on Google cares if the answer took an hour or two days. Apart from you, I guess.

> It shows -- the quality of the answer is quite poor.

Are we talking about the same question? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17731457/hide-show-conte... I'll admit that it's not always easy to judge if an answer is useful to someone else, but it looks to me like it answers the question, the user "accepted" it, and it has 23 points. What makes you say it's "poor"?

> I guess the only assessment you considered is your own

The only strike against it you cite is some push-back in a comment... What else do you have against it?

> which simplistically assumed time to answer is the most important factor.

On top of the user accepting it, it having 23 points, it answering the question, etc.

I mean, I think I would be pleased with the outcome if I were the OP. I think I would be pleased to find that answer if I came from a Google search. If you honestly think that this is an example of "people continuously questioning the poster's motive" and exemplifies what you don't like about SO, then yeah, I don't agree with your assessment. It's not an attack on you, chill out.

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