I don't know about cruft, but I just don't like it.
I'm going to try to be a little bit more helpful. At first I didn't really know why I felt a bit uncomfortable on the page, but I think it comes from a feeling a bit lost. My attempts to try to understand why:
1. The pictures don't have any borders, so at first I think a part of the picture is hidden outside the window. I widen the window to see the whole picture, but instead of revealing any missing part the picture just gets bigger.
2. If I continue increase the size of the window until the picture stops scaling, I eventually see the grey area to the right, which give me the feeling of locking behind the coulisses at a theater. I shouldn't be there and see that. Contributing to that might be the lack of shadow on the right side, which makes that border flat compared to the left side.
3. I scroll down to gauge the length of the article before I start reading, and it just continue to scroll and I realize after a while that I'm in some other article and I have scrolled through a whole bunch of them. The boundaries between the articles are very weak compared with the pictures and in particular the thick black fields with the captions.
I'm going to try to be a little bit more helpful. At first I didn't really know why I felt a bit uncomfortable on the page, but I think it comes from a feeling a bit lost. My attempts to try to understand why:
1. The pictures don't have any borders, so at first I think a part of the picture is hidden outside the window. I widen the window to see the whole picture, but instead of revealing any missing part the picture just gets bigger.
2. If I continue increase the size of the window until the picture stops scaling, I eventually see the grey area to the right, which give me the feeling of locking behind the coulisses at a theater. I shouldn't be there and see that. Contributing to that might be the lack of shadow on the right side, which makes that border flat compared to the left side.
3. I scroll down to gauge the length of the article before I start reading, and it just continue to scroll and I realize after a while that I'm in some other article and I have scrolled through a whole bunch of them. The boundaries between the articles are very weak compared with the pictures and in particular the thick black fields with the captions.