Ask HN: Why are images used to indent comments?

if i had to guess, i'd say that its just less resource intensive or easeier. much easier to just print it out with an indention instead of parsing results into a tree and then printing.

I guess if it ain't broken don't fix it.

All the threads live in nice tables and gifs are the appropriate technology to accompany them! Enough to give any CSS or SEO evangelist apoplyxia!

Because the code that generates HN pages was written in the laziest and least-accessible way possible.

I assume they are using single pixel gifs and playing with the width to indent. That is old school, the way it was done before css. Maybe they just never quit. I still prefer to use tables to structure some types of content, it won't win me any awards from the css crowd but it's just easier. Why make life difficult?

I've got to say, the markup for the comments page is pretty ugly. I'm not going to diss the one who designed it, but I think it could really do with an overhaul. It wouldn't be difficult at all - just cascading, nested divs with incrementally increasing left-padding.

Unless there is a reason for the tables, they're not semantic, it's ugly, and it doesn't make any sense! And it's slower to render.

I think one of the main reasons some web design techniques are "bad" are because they don't sufficiently separate layout and design from content. The problem is - on a site like HN, you're primarily catering to a crowd that just wants a really simple, straightforward design that's easy to use to fast. We get that with a 1-pixel image. Adding css could potentially throw more complexity into the mix.

I'd guess it's simply that PG codes html the way he learned years ago.

Not snark – you have to justify throwing out your table + spacer.gif knowledge to learn how to do things with div + css. Maybe he doesn't see a huge benefit.

Also (http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html):

Arc embodies a similarly unPC attitude to HTML. The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

...

Tables are the lists of html. The W3C doesn't like you to use tables to do more than display tabular data because then it's unclear what a table cell means. But this sort of ambiguity is not always an error. It might be an accurate reflection of the programmer's state of mind. In exploratory programming, the programmer is by definition unsure what the program represents.

Because it works.

Lack of CSS understanding. No excuse.

Once you know your tools you can do wonders you'll be amazed at how easy it was.

I bet a hundred CSS experts here can give you some interesting ways on redesigning comments.

Show us your best.

  <div class="comment level0">
    <a class="up"></a> 
    <a class="dn off"></a>
    <h1>title</h1>
    <p class="minus2">comment here</p>
  </div>