Comment by sillysaurusx
2 years ago
(I personally agree with you, but I just wanted to point out that https://news.ycombinator.com/front is how to see yesterday's front page at any given time. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2024-01-19 makes it clear who the black bar was about.)
One (rather cold) way of viewing the situation is that if they spend their time adding this feature, it's at the expense of something else they could be doing. There are technical reasons it's not quite as straightforward as just setting a title attribute.
Here's precisely how the black bar works:
https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...
; (tr (tdcolor black (vspace 5)))
They uncomment that line of code by removing the semicolon, then deploy it. ("Deploy" is also known as "copy-pasting that function into a REPL," but devs like to overcomplicate it in other languages.)
If it were as simple as writing "Dave Mills [YYYY]-[YYYY]", they might actually do that. But Arc doesn't have keyword arguments, and tdcolor has no way of passing along a "title:" keyword in order to set the html attribute.
It's partly why I updated Arc with keyword arguments.
But, there's still that other aspect: figuring out [YYYY]-[YYYY] takes some amount of time, so it increases the activation energy of the black bar considerably. Right now it's a one-character deletion followed by a deploy. Honoring legendary hackers is a good thing, but the black bar already does that.
I understand tradeoffs & 'technical reasons'. But, a web framework that makes specifying tiny useful HTML edits noticeably harder in code than similar changes would be in plain-text strikes me as defective. That's especially true for a broadly-useful 'global attribute' – supported on all HTML elements – like TITLE.
Looking at the precedents in code near what you've linked, for how possibly-arbitrary STYLE and CLASS and COLSPAN and CELLPADDING and WIDTH attributes are set, it's hard to see why it shouldn't be as easy as something like:
Of course, it might not yet be that easy.
But if that's hard to support, with a couple low-risk broadly-beneficial lines elsewhere, then rumors of Arc's concise expressive power seem exaggerated.