It should be a clone... also in UI!

[NKjoep]

I wanted to say congrats for the nice project! 💪

I was thinking it would be nice to have a rendered UI as close as possible as the original one :)

Some time ago I started a css/html clone of the Hacker News UI just for fun, I was trying to reproduce the same pixel perfect result on the browser but with better markup (bleah those tables 🐙 ) and with flexbox :)

Do you think you can improve it?
Or either, would you accept a PR with some code introducing a 1:1 result but with better markup?

[NKjoep]

I forgot to link the experiment I mentioned: https://github.com/NKjoep/hn-meets-modern-html

[clintonwoo]

Hey thanks for getting in touch. Looks like you've done a nice job with the HTML! I starred your repo, well deserved. It's true the original HN HTML is quite badly structured and makes little to no sense today.

This project is mostly a direct copy of HN with all the functionality provided by the web API (which is a lot but not everything) but the website has a large number of pages. It looks like your HTML is fairly close but the header is different on Mobile and it seems like you haven't reconstructed the whole website. There would likely be some html errors with React components (which can be pages too) expecting to be in a table if the site is only partially converted.

To me it only makes sense to change the HTML if the whole project does it (or at least every page that uses the Main layout). It would be a lot of work to change and maintain especially if something changes in the future (Some data may become available in the HN API or we rebuild it in the clone). I guess that there may be 20 files to change even before future maintenance is required.

What do you think about what I have to say?