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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't he just want... a plain-text interface?

Why are we assigning motives to creations where none is stated? ASCII art loads fast and the miniscule stylesheet and script barely slows anything down.

Plenty of people who aren't disabled like minimalist interfaces, because minimalist interfaces tend to stay relatively static.

Plus, in this case, the main utility seems to be that there's a single place you can check the results of any mainstream sports event, rather than going through the million hoops to get search engines to give you a page where you can find results.

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This site is HTML, replacing <div> with <table> wouldn't change that. Tabular data can still be plain text. It's just rendered in tables instead of divs and spans.

Plain text is good because it

1. Loads fast 2. Can be parsed easily

<table>s load just as fast, and can be parsed much faster by humans and computers alike.

Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly. This is all costs of markup without any benefit. Bring accessibility in the mix (which we should always do) and it's a non-starter.

> Either don't use HTML and use plain text instead, or use it correctly.

Says who? The owner of the website here owes us nothing.

I mean it as a constructive criticism, not a pull request. It's a cool project (enough that I wanted to see how it's built).

Personally, I love the site, and I'm glad it is the way it is: It looks and feels better than any plausible alternative. It sure seems like it has all of the benefits and only one of the drawbacks (vaguely inaccessible).

A person can just make something for their own enjoyment. It's not the end of the world.

The primary drawback is that it's not plain text, so it doesn't have the benefit that a plain text format would.

This isn't "plain text." It's still laid out via HTML (and CSS). HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are perfect for tabular data, which most of this data displayed on this particular site is. A proper "plain text" interface in HTML would be the data wrapped in a PRE tag, right?

To be clear, regardless of the HTML layout, I do like this site, because I can quickly and easily check NHL scores and standings without the cruft that comes from most sporting websites.

> HTML tables somehow get a bad rap, but they are perfect for tabular data, which most of this data displayed on this particular site is.

For me, not supporting some kind of sorting natively makes them not perfect. It's really important for me when reading tabular data to have that option.

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