Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unalone | Hacker News Reader

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Let me be testy back.

Get the goal of pixel perfection out of your mind. It can't be done, because you don't have a clue how each person's browser/system is configured. And it shouldn't be done, because then it's too easy to forget about graceful degradation.

That's ridiculous. You don't stop striving for perfection just because there's no such thing as absolutely perfect. Are you suggesting designers not develop pixel-by-pixel until the site looks like exactly what they want it to be in their minds? Yeah - that won't work for everybody. At the same time, that's no reason to stop designing as anally and as focused as possible. I hate that mindset: by that standard why design at all? Why not make everything black-on-white, no borders, no margins, just a list of features you can click on?

Either you design, or you don't design. There's no in-between. If you're designing something, you had better be designing with everything you've got, and yes: that means jiggling pixels until they look absolutely perfect. Apple does it, Facebook does it, I do it. Lots of designers do it. There's no reason for you not to do it.

For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever.

With respect, are you complaining that because you changed your browser's interpretation of the web, something on another site broke? So now you're saying that because of the things that you changed on your computer, it's a fault with Facebook's design. Am I missing something here? Because that sounds pretty snotty.

If you've got accessibility issues, then you're going to see drawbacks when you're using things. Yes, that's the job of the designer to fix, but if they work on fixing it and it's not a completely perfect fix, that's not saying anything bad about their original design.

Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons.

It's okay. We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when people suggest that it's not worth aiming for perfection. Every great thing that's ever been made had people saying it wasn't worth trying.

> Let me be testy back.

This is kinda fun.

> because of the things that you changed on your computer, it's a fault with Facebook's design

You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something outrageous to it. I haven't.

You know, a person doesn't need to have major ooga-booga accessibility problems for sites to be "broken." Try fiddling with the width of your browser window. Monitor resolutions are all different, plus some people want the browser window to take up, say, half the width.

Facebook does have a design problem when its horizontal scroll bar is borked.

> We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when people suggest that it's not worth aiming for perfection.

Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site for whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone.

You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something outrageous to it. I haven't.

Hm. I just installed Windows XP out of the box, and Facebook works on IE6. That's as strict a test as need be applied.

Facebook has a fixed width. Is that anything new? Lots of site have fixed-width. Even if you're too narrow, can't you scroll normally?

Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site for whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone.

There isn't going to be a "next" iPhone. There's the iPhone. The next big thing will not be compared to the iPhone at all.

I don't like making things gracefully degrade past a point. I would never design my web site to work for the iPhone. When it comes to making things iPhone-accessible, I'll make a separate thing. Same to when I design a Facebook app for my site.

If you're testing against IE6 XP that's the worst test you can do.

We test against IE6 + 7 on XP, Firefox on XP, OS X, Safari XP, OS X minimum. With checking Opera and Chrome to make sure. A complicated design can easily render significantly differently and break very easily.

IE 6 is possibly the worst browser you can develop for. Get it working for Firefox and most phones can render it just fine.

I test every major browser, mainly because usually everything works right the first time. I design in a way that doesn't lead to much breakage in any browser but IE 6.

> Hm. I just installed Windows XP out of the box, and Facebook works on IE6. That's as strict a test as need be applied.

I am laughing so hard. You need to put a little icon on the sites you develop saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 6," and be sure to post on the front page "Please set your monitor to 1600x1200" (or whatever your out-of-the-box resolution happens to be). Oh, that's right. We're several years past such practices by now. Darn. Yes, I know you work with a few browsers, maybe on some different boxen. But I hope you realize how silly you sound there. :-)

> Facebook has a fixed width. Is that anything new? Lots of site have fixed-width. Even if you're too narrow, can't you scroll normally?

Nope. Not in Firefox 2 on my OS X box. I can horizontal scroll abnormally, but not normally: I can easily scroll with the arrow keys, but scrolling with the mouse requires tremendous aim and coordination. Why? Because a toolbar element which sits perpetually at the bottom of the window partially covers my horizontal scroll bar. (Granted, I haven't glanced at Facebook in a couple weeks. I have no idea how it looks and behaves at this moment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515376)

If I were one of my non-tech-savvy friends, I would say, "I hate Facebook. Why does it do that at the bottom? I can't move it sideways! I need to get my friend to fix my internet for me. I hate computers." But instead I say, "I hate some aspects of CSS, and I'm starting to wish the DIV element had never been invented. DIVs are meaningless when they're put to so many arbitrary uses. Shameful."

I'm not keen on TDD, but a good takeaway from it is, "Only write testable code." When a page consists of a mass of nested DIVs and a tangled cascade of styles, when sizes and positions are controlled by a mishmash of width, height, top, right, bottom, left, border, padding, margin, float, clear, auto, px, pt, em, ex, %, you name it, the page is essentially untestable, undebuggable, and unmodifiable. Try to add an element whose position is fixed to the bottom of the viewport, and you're asking for even more trouble.

Facebook's horizontal scrollbar problem might be remedied merely by changing a margin spec somewhere to a padding, or vice versa, but I pity the poor developer who tries to figure this out. I'm assuming Facebook developers are not so idiotic as to not glance at their work in some different browsers with some different window sizes on some different platforms. But when a borked scrollbar shows up, it's a bad sign, for it means Facebook is creating something too hard to maintain. And ever more people will mutter, "Why does it do this? I hate computers."

When I say "maintain," I mean supporting a larger spectrum of users. A few weeks ago, I read that Facebook has 175M users, of which the fastest-growing segment is 55-year-old women. (Sorry I can't find a link now.) If a site reaches a point where it becomes "necessary" for functioning in civilization, it faces the nearly unimaginable task of supporting "everybody." For starts, try picturing people of assorted abilities on welfare using whatever systems happen to be available at a community center in a church basement. Good luck.

> Google sucks at design.

Today Facebook is hardly necessary to modern civilization, but Google's search might be. "Sucky" design means a web page can be used by a greater variety of people. And the daunting thought of becoming something like an infrastructure utility company probably has Google thinking long and hard about "everybody."

> There isn't going to be a "next" iPhone. There's the iPhone. The next big thing will not be compared to the iPhone at all.

Okay, whatever. I was just trying to dream up something that hasn't been seen yet. Maybe imagine a visual gizmo between a laptop and a handheld, something for which neither the @screen nor @handheld media type is quite suitable.

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