Ask HN: Hacker News page width broken on mobile

24 points by valine ↗ HN
The hacker news homepage is flowing off the screen on mobile today. Anyone else seeing this? The previous style sheet was practically perfect, hoping it isn’t a permanent change.

17 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] thread
Seems to have suddenly jumped for me in the last 10 minutes, yeah.
I hope dang fixes it lol. The horizontal scrolling is very annoying.
Rather than just blindly hope, it's more productive to email the HN mod team directly: hn@ycombinator.com
Same just changed to for me.
Same, only the main pages though. Clicking into comments is normal. Anyone email Dan?
I just noticed this, it happened after I changed my top bar color, so I thought maybe I broke it for me.
The issue is caused by the CNYoungerCousin(and so on) article title being 80-100 characters long without having a space in it. There’s no way to word wrap it and it breaks the style sheet.

If you browse HN /new with showdead enabled, there are often spam article titles where the spaces are replaced with ‘+’ and a long enough title without spaces will break the style sheet in the same way, which is how I found out about it and also how to fix it.

The solution is to click ‘hide’ on the offending article title and everything will word wrap correctly again.

>There’s no way to word wrap it and it breaks the style sheet.

I wonder, would using the word-break css property not work[0]? Or barring that, a max-width for the title with a text-overflow set to hidden?

[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/word-break

Both of those were suggested in the offending thread, and both would indeed work.

My phrasing was bad, “HN’s default style sheet doesn’t word wrap extremely long titles properly” is more accurate.

Thanks! I was having the same problem, on both iPhone and iPad Safari. Hiding the CNYoungerCousin... article fixed the problem immediately.
I’m surprised so many people use the website in mobile over the many great HN Apps out there. Octal on iOS is one of my favorite apps.
Why would I need an app when the site works perfect on mobile browsers?

I almost find it kind of funny that the general narrative on HN is “not every site needs its own app!” and then when we finally have a site that works flawlessly on mobile, people still suggest an app for it!

The app improves my user experience, and considering how often I use it, even subtle UX and UI improvements make a big difference.