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by ibejoeb 2124 days ago
Is this really how Harper's distributes its content digitally?
4 comments

It's an "Annotation" which I guess is different than normal? https://harpers.org/sections/annotation/

From their page:

Annotation: A closer look into the meanings and histories of everyday documents, diagrams, maps, and images.

I don't even see anything on the page. I'm guessing this is their anti-adblock tactic? If so I'm fine not viewing their content.
You're not missing much. The story is about a house that got blurred out of Street View because a horrible crime was going on there at the time the image was acquired.
The entire article is a PDF embedded into an iFrame, it doesn't render without Javascript enabled. It's very odd to me, I have no idea why they'd choose that format. Maybe the article was written for print and they just decided not to port it? I don't think it would be difficult to show this content in HTML form.

In any case, if you're really curious you can visit the PDF directly, with no JS requirements, at https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/September_202...

I wondered that too. Looks like a PDF embedded in the page. Maybe they still make some physical magazine and the web content is secondary.