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Comment by cfitz | Hacker News Reader

Irrelevant to the content of the article, but I am such a fan of the direction the NYT has taken with their interactive articles. Breaking up long-winded articles via relevant images is no longer sufficient to maintain most readers' attention. The NYT may just reach their 10 million subscriber goal [1] via these very enjoyable (often scroll-triggered) animations and charts/graphics and I hope they continue with these efforts.

[1] https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-enlisting-interacti...

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I like it, but it's also a bit confusing. I use a read it later service (Instapaper) to read articles from everywhere and interactive ones like this tend to break it.

That in itself is okay, it's just that you don't realize it's broken unless you open the full article and look for interactive bits.

I understand what you are getting at, but it's really a problem with Instapaper. We shouldn't really expect NYTimes to not exploit the full power of web technologies simply because read-it-later services may not present them in the same way. The readers have to adapt to the content, and not the other way around.

To some degree, yes, but then it's also a problem at Pocket, Evernote, Readability, ReadKit, Safari Reading List, ...

If the content breaks all of their parsers and scrapers because it's tied up in these custom dynamic components, then I wouldn't really expect all of the parsers to handle that themselves. (Of course one pure text standard would be nice.)

The bigger issue to me is that the omissions are silent.

I think what we need is a standard packaging format that will allow services to download interactive articles and all their dependencies easily. Then they can just render it in a web view.

> interactive [articles] like this tend to break [Instapaper].

I would argue it is squarely the other way around.

Completely agreed. This was an enjoyable experience for me, even on a phone. And it didn’t seem to come at the cost of journalistic quality.

Hmmm... It seemed to lose track of the scroll position completely by the end for me (Firefox on android). Possibly ad blocker related. Interesting piece, though.

> Reporting was contributed by Manuela Andreoni, Jeremy Ashkenas, Laurent Bastien Corbeil, Nic Dias, Elise Hansen, Michael Keller, Manuel Villa and Felipe Villamor. Research was contributed by Susan C. Beachy, Doris Burke and Alain Delaquérière.

I already knew he worked for NYT, but still: I wonder how much it matters that the creator of Coffeescript was second author on this article.

Those names are alphabetical, so I think he just wins by virtue of his natural name advantage :)

Hah, I've worked for academia for too long :)

Some branches of academia (high energy physics) list authors alphabetically.

I don't think you can really compare papers with thousands of authors to papers with a handful.

Opposite side. I opened the article, tried to scroll, and switched to Firefox's Reader Mode instead.

Just give the the motherlovin' text.

Side note: NYTimes formats tables in nonstandard ways that break both Firefox Reader Mode and Pocket (these use the same parser AFAIU). That's annoying. Standards exist for reasons.

Completely agree. Having enjoyed these pleasant improvements, I am considering subscribing again.

The "Families of bots" chart was so incredibly cool it floored me.

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