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by virchau13 1491 days ago
> they also take a lot of time and effort to produce

This is a case of bad tooling, not an intrinsic fact.

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit... is an article that could have easily been written without any interactive components. All the author did was replace traditional code blocks with an embed to a web playground (e.g. by s/Code/Playground/g in a MDX file). Ta-da, the demonstrations are immediately interactive.

> and thus will remain a minority.

Not if we put in effort to encourage them. On the other hand, if we put in effort to _discourage_ them (say, by splitting the web into documents without interaction and apps with interaction), they will disappear completely. It is not worth sacrificing these creations simply so that we can remove a few bad actors. (Mind you, there are many ways to act badly in non-interactive ways too. Image watermarks, embedded advertisements in videos, embedded advertisements in ASCII text...)

1 comments

> All the author did was replace traditional code blocks with an embed to a web playground (e.g. by s/Code/Playground/g in a MDX file).

Well, not surprising given that the article was about the web technology (which powers the application web, of course!). I might have been convinced otherwise.

There is indeed some negative feedback loop going here. But I think the cost to achieve interactivity has been decreasing over the time (compare with, say, 1990s' interactive CD) and the gap is still very significant, even with a very favorable condition (nowadays you can practically have interactivity anywhere anytime!). I'm happy to be proven wrong, but for now I'm not optimistic about that.