[chipotle_coyote]

If you're actually interested in reading this report as opposed to struggling through the web presentation, this is the link to the PDF:

http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/Mighty-Earth-R...

This piece did inadvertently introduce me to Shorthand, which tells me that "the world's most successful digital storytelling teams" are using it to "create simply beautiful stories using" Shorthand's "beautifully simple" story editor. I can only wonder how much more successful those teams could be if they would beautifully, simply stop.

[amluto]

Wow. Did they ever try reading the text on their shiny responsive layout on mobile? Over half my screen is covered in overlays.

[13of40]

That explains why I waited a minute for it to display anything over 2g before I gave up...

[aphroz]

Thanks, I totally agree with you. Never heard about Shorthand before but it makes Medium looks great compared to it.

[sct202]

Maybe Shorthand made it too easy to do all the overlays and timeline things, like when prezi first came out and everyone used a million zoom-in / zoom-outs in presentations.

[alanbernstein]

I've never heard of shorthand before, but it seems fine to me, what's your issue with it? It works fine, and performantly, in desktop Firefox with a moderate amount of adblock/privacy extensions active. It's mostly just text that you can scroll through like any other article. It just has some semi-sticky images and a timeline widget which, to me, only add to the presentation. It's not like they're hijacking the scroll action to ruin normal browser behavior.

If it sucks on mobile, so what? Everything sucks on mobile.

[umanwizard]

It’s simply not true that everything sucks on mobile. A lot of sites are much more usable than that one.

[alanbernstein]

I'll rephrase: 99% of the time, the desktop version of a site is better than the mobile version in every way. This site is no exception.

I have now had a chance to see it in a mobile browser though, and yeah, it is pretty bad. Still, the desktop site is much better, as usual.

[chipotle_coyote]

It seems fine to me, what's your issue with it?

It performs well enough on my connection, because it's pretty good about playing "load as you go." But it's loading a lot of stuff. By the time I scrolled to the end and read through the entire timeline, this "web page" had loaded over 52M of data.

Speaking of scrolling, I had to scroll both down and to the side at various points to accomodate that "clever" timeline thing. I don't think this sort of approach is particularly user-friendly. It's even worse on mobile.

Mobile! As noted, this site doesn't do well on mobile, and it's not doing badly on mobile in a "Well, all sites are bad on mobile, [shrug emoji]" fashion. It's very clear that the site is trying to demonstrate responsive design: it's not "broken because tiny screen," it's "unpleasant experience because poor design choices." Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman is a lovely fellow, but I don't actually need his image in a partially-transparent overlay taking up nearly half the screen of my iPhone XR when I'm reading his forward. The timeline display is even more annoying on the phone, as it starts with a non-modal "swipe to navigate, OK?" demand. If you get past that, scrolling gets janky, until you move past and get another fixed image which only takes up a third of your screen this time. So yay.

Actually, I'd argue scrolling is kind of janky even on the desktop, in no small part because it's doing all this fancy "here's a picture scrolling up with the text! now it's fixed! now it's scrolling!" Is it pretty? I guess. Would it be less pretty if the images were just, you know, images on the side of the text? Not really, and if you just let a web browser scroll a page without this kind of fluffery, it scrolls really well! Scrolling turns out to be a solved problem! Also, does the picture of Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman need to be that big on the desktop? No. No, Mr. Waxman, it does not.

Last but not least: you know how I mentioned the web page was over 52M of data? The PDF with the same data is only a hair over 36M. It doesn't have a cute scrolling timeline in it, but it does have footnotes. Which the Shorthand web version doesn't. The web version has footnote numbers, but they don't go anywhere -- no links, no popovers.. For a report that has 61 footnotes, this is actually a pretty big fail.

So that's my issue with Shorthand. Thanks for asking!

[alanbernstein]

Some good points. 52M is an absurd amount of data for this.

I have to disagree on the scrolling behavior. If you think of the goal as just trying to reproduce static printed content, then sure, scrolling is a "solved problem". But this presentation method is actually a meaningful improvement. Photos for an article are probably the least useful example, but imagine reading a technical article, with diagrams that you want to reference multiple times while scrolling through the text. Or a code tutorial, with code blocks on the right and extensive documentation on the left.

This behavior can probably be achieved with 10 lines of JS and CSS, almost certainly not the case here. But despite the ostensible problems with this implementation, the idea is good, and I'd be happy to see this more often. As long as it's performant, responsive, not full of tracking nonsense, etc.

[saagarjha]

> Everything sucks on mobile.

Not if you put a bit of thought into your web design, it doesn’t.