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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

That might be non-standard now but spacer gifs did a lot of the heavy lifting in website layout between about 1995 and 2010.

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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 of some sort or (increasingly common as you got past the '90s) 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 standard practice AFAIK.

Tables were the design element de jure, so much so you could export your UI design straight to generated table HTML.

I still remember how to lay out pages with tables. Just another in the long list of programming techs filling my brain that will never get used again like Hypertalk and Actionscript

Yes, in dreamweaver I definitely moved stuff around using either gifs or transparent tables.

At least that was a lot better than using   which most FrontPage users did. I cleaned up so much in that time :D

A 2021 appeal to bring them back: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/modern-spacer-gif/

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

If the domain not be well understood when one is crafting the markup for a layout as simple as Hacker News's, one simply lacks even the most basic experience.

There is no need to use exploratory programming for such matters; it is a very common and well understood problem for which there are good and bad solutions.

A simple `margin-left: 20px;` in CSS is a good solution; transparent spacing images are ridiculous.

one simply lacks even the most basic experience

Considering pg's background I don't think it's that.

Which is why I believe that the domain was quite well understood, and that exploratory programming to generate the markup for this simple website is a mistake.

exploratory programming to generate the markup for this simple website is a mistake

You're wrong because you think the goal was to make a website.

Judging by the arclanguage.org post linked earlier, the goal was to test the Arc language as an example of exploratory programming to make a web application, with the measure of success being "as little Arc code as possible". The HTML output was intentionally 'bad' from a web development perspective, but 'good' from an Arc perspective. Consequently if you judge it purely in terms of web development it does look pretty awful, but that isn't the context it was written in so that's not a fair way to look at it.

Tables and spacer gifs don't necessarily use less Arc code than a simpler layout would. The table layout might even use a bit more if it requires more iteration, macro expansion and branching to render. There are special case macros in the html library for generating parts of the forum table that wouldn't be necessary otherwise.

Also, the goal clearly was to make a website, because pg made a website, and here we all are. Once you put your MVP online it's valid to criticize decisions made for it in that context.

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