Taptalk is broken

[KenGordon]

This is not to be snarky, just so I understand what you're talking about. You don't like the space on the left because it's essentially unused space in your web browser? Your complaint is that the ads that you've blocked still take up the same amount of space, just without the visible ads? You want the site to scale to full screen width, but without the ads?

Unfortunately no, there is no ad blocking going on. There is an ad on the left at the top of the screen (next to the first post) then blank below that. So there isn't even any revenue being generated by that space. If isn't even achieving the goal.

 

[doctormike]

The people that say "it works for me" are literally useless in a professional development environment.

I agree, "Works on my machine" is a useless reply to a bug report.

But I don't think that you are reporting a bug, you are critiquing a design decision. That's fine, your expertise in this area is a useful contribution to the discussion, just as if we were discussing diving. But like a diving discussion, there are rarely circumstances where one approach is so far superior that any alternative can only be seen as an error, not a deliberate and supportable choice.

...this seems to be an active decision to prioritise advertising and (maybe - I suspect it is wrong) google rankings over user experience. That is the tail wagging the dog.

Any advertising on any website will always degrade the user experience. There are three options: Ads, subscriptions, or relying on hobbyists to develop and maintain websites as a labor of love, without charging.

 

[Hawkwood]

I am not at all angry. I do software (proper software, not web) for a living. When there are sues and bugs the hard bit is reproducing the bug. The people that say "it works for me" are literally useless in a professional development environment.

...

True, but it's not a bug.

 

[KenGordon]

Six Stages of Debugging // plasmasturm.org

Is there a spec somewhere that says "on an iPad show 40% white space to the left, on the iPhone show no white space to the left"?

 

[kelemvor]

One of the points of html, before css, was that it was up to the target device to decide exactly how to render the page. That was of course a complete failure and there have been generations of failures since.

Respectfully, I disagree. Pure HTML is very capable. The reputation of HTML is tarnished due to an abundance of incompetent web developers in the world. When my web guys write pages, I insist on only HTML on the client side (with some exceptions). HTML can be done very well, it just isn't usually.

Personally, I could be a happy man with ANSI C, HTML, Javascript, and Java. Maybe even some C++ with a static link compile if necessary. Storage and bandwidth capacity in general have increased so much that the value of dynamic links is seriously degraded.