Anytime tonsky's site gets posted here, I'm reminded by how awful it is, which is ironic given his UI/UX background. The site's lightmode is a blinding saturated yellow, and if you switch into darkmode, it's an even less readable "cute" flashlight js trick. I don't know why he thought this was a good idea. Thank god for Firefox reader mode.
I'm having a hard time reconciling "he knows what he is doing" with him making his site practically unusable without a reader mode, which by the way, not every browser supports (especially on mobile).
Don't even think of switching on the dark (night) mode with that attitude! :D
I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek design. I think every modern browser either allows you to turn on reader mode (especially on mobile) or just turn off CSS. This particular article works excellently even in w3m.
Fine, sure. Cute - turn on reader mode. Now the images that are supposed to be sitting over yellow background are dark gray images over a slightly less dark gray background.
The decision to design a serious (read: not-tongue-in-cheek) topic with these "quirky" tricks sucks, JMHO.
> Don't even think of switching on the dark (night) mode with that attitude! :D
:D
> I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek design. I think every modern browser either allows you to turn on reader mode (especially on mobile) or just turn off CSS. This particular article works excellently even in w3m.
Firefox Focus on mobile does not have Reader Mode.
It's deeply ironic that an article about dealing with text properly has images which are part of the article text and yet have no alt-text, rendering parts of the article unreadable in reader mode if the server is slow.
It is obviously a joke (and a good one, I dare say). The fact that people seem to take it seriously says something about the contemporary state of webdesign :)
2. I don't think it's a very good joke to post long-form content on your blog with the expectation that it's basically unreadable without a reader mode.
> The fact that people seem to take it seriously says something about the contemporary state of webdesign :)
Mind expanding and what it says exactly about contemporary web design?
Whether I take it seriously or not doesn't change the fact that it's still damn hard to read anything.
Works like a normal website with JavaScript disabled. I didn't even know it did fancy junk until reading the comments here. NoScript saves the day again! I don't know how people can browse the web without it.
I never understood how people can browser the we WITH IT. Even 10 years ago. today more then ever basically every website needs JS to work properly. I basically never come across a page where I have the urge to disable JS. I have a large list of adblock lists active that also help getting rid of cookie banners and other shit.
I can not imagine manually approving JS for every site. And again doing the inverse and have noscript installed to deny one website a year does not seem to be worth it for me. In this case I can also just use a adblock rule to block that specific script or all .js files from the domain I guess. So I really no not need NoScript.
Many sites don't need JS at all, like the OP of this thread for example. For a lot of sites, disabling JS actually gives a better experience than leaving it enabled, again like the OP of this thread. It's a trade-off, but I find most uses of JS are so bad it's worth putting up with whitelisting. For example, I don't see cookie pop-ups, I don't see videos, disabling JS kills most of those stupid sticky headers that web designers love so much, and whatever too-clever crap the OP of this thread was doing is completely bypassed. The web is so, so much better with JS off by default.
For those sites that do need JS, NoScript's whitelist feature makes it quick & easy to fix. The first time I visit a new site, if it is obviously broken, then I whitelist the main domain. If that doesn't fix it, then I whitelist a couple likely-looking domains (often sites import JS from similar domains, or from common library domains). That's enough to get probably 90+% of websites working, while still leaving most garbage JS disabled. The remaining ~10% of websites that need a dozen domains whitelisted are probably not worth visiting anyway, so I just move on at that point. Or NoScript even lets you temp-whitelist everything for a given tab and just put up with the misery to get whatever I need from that one site. Since the whitelist persists forever, and I don't visit hundreds of different websites every day, after some time it becomes pretty rare that I need to whitelist more than one or two things per day.
You maintain an adblock blacklist, I maintain a NoScript whitelist. Not so different :)
By default the script for the page itself is whitelisted, it is just the third party scripts that are blocked. This works fairly often, but there are a few sites that you can also globally unblock because they provide value. One example is mathjax, used to format equations on many pages.
It is some time ago since I last used it, but I found that too many websites that I want to read require Javascript to even show you the main body of text, or a reasonable layout. Is that different now?
No. Just whitelist the main domain for sites that are obviously broken. Then try one or two likely subdomains if that's not enough. In the rare cases where it still wants more crap enabled, then it's usually not worth the effort, close tab and move on to something else. As you build up a whitelist over time, it becomes pretty rare that you need to interact with it more than a couple times per day. Yeah, it takes some effort, but it's worth it to nuke cookie banners and sticky headers and videos and all the other crap people do with JS.
I already have that routine with uBlock Origin. I don't think NoScript offers all of uBO's functionality, and I certainly won't do the same dance for two extensions, but I'll look into uBO's abilities to specifically block JS.
Makes sense! I use both, uBO just does its thing and I never interact with it. NoScript handles blocking & whitelisting javascript. It's totally possible uBO has a similar feature and I just don't know about it.
I've been drawing circles for over a minute now and no one has joined me yet, so I conclude those movements are random rather than made by intelligent beings. :)
I did the same for a while while I was reading. From another comment, the position only seems to update once a second, so it'll be hard for someone to notice your movements.
It's quite possibly the worst web page presentation I've come across in a long time - aside from the fact it looks like some bug has caused my OS to leave a random trail of mouse pointers all over the screen, some of them even move around, making me doubt my sanity when I'm quite sure I'm holding the mouse still.
And the less said about the colours the better. There's no way I was going to put up with that long enough to read all the text on it.
Good times. If you click on the sun switch the entire UI gets zeroed out and you get to use on:hover mouse shtick to read the UI through a fuzzy radius. Is Yoko Ono designing websites now?
> If you can't handle refreshing or merely clicking it again, that's you having a problem, not the site having a problem.
No, it's the site's problem. The contrast between the blinding radioactive yellow background and the font is eye straining and doesn't meet the WCAG standards for accessible text. And the dark mode is unusable. The joke would be funnier if there was a real dark mode or if the light mode was readable.
You said the joke made you leave. The normal color scheme is not part of the joke, and I'm sorry it hurts your eyes. I won't try to defend the eye hurting.
> doesn't meet the WCAG standards for accessible text.
Oh, which part of the standards? When I punch #000000 on #FDDB29 into contrast checkers I get good results.
The single quote isn't as good but all the rest has those colors.
It's cute, and provides a hint of human connection that is otherwise absent on the web "hey, another human is reading this too!" which you probably know but something about seeing the pointer move makes it feel real.
Probably not the greatest during a hacker news hug of death, but if I read that article some other time and saw one of the moving pointers, I would think it was really cool.
Have you ever read with other people, like in school or a book club, or been somewhere that there were other people around? It's an interesting move by the author; the loneliness epidemic hasn't gone unnoticed.
Too bad the Linux and the Mac pointer look so similar. But when you give them different background colors, it becomes more obvious which platform dominates, like: