Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I've always disliked the "BIG TEXT CHOPPED-OUT BUT YOU'LL READ IT BELOW AGAIN IN JUST A SECOND" paradigm in magazines and newspapers. Like, I'm reading the article anyway, why suddenly spit some of the words in my face super big? I'm guessing it's for skimmers, catch their eye and bring them into an interesting paragraph that's further down from the top.

But this article does it at the beginning... we read the sentence "Hello, I used to build very large JavaScript applications" three times. First as an image, then as a label for the image... and then as the first sentence of the article. Why lol

Recently, I'm annoyed at coming into a hackernews thread and the top thing is some completely irrelevant thing.

meta

> Why lol

Because, even closer to the beginning, in the real first sentence of the article (by which I mean, the first sentence after the title), it says, "This is a mildly edited transcript of my JSConf Australia talk."

This is not an example of the "big text chopped out" paradigm from magazines, it's an example of the, "each slide contains a brief of the most important part of what you'll be saying while that slide is being displayed" paradigm from conference lectures.

And therein is also seen a limitation of using someone else’s blog engine; on large (wide) displays, this would be better done with the slides on one side, and the speech on the other, appropriately lined up. But you can’t do that when you’re using Medium for the post.

The problem is those slides hinder the readability of the actual article.

For a reader, you get into the rhythm of the writer's voice, only to be interrupted by a giant image of text every other paragraph. It's a battle between just skimming the slides, or trying to read the content.

If the author had just swapped out the "loud" text images for subtle headers, the article would actually flow.

I've been thinking the exact same thing for years and couldn't put it into words.

The most annoying thing is I can never be sure whether the BIG TEXT CHOPPED-OUT is actually going to be repeated again later in the article. Otherwise I'd just happily ignore those big sections every single time. As it is now, I have to read it and then get mad when moments later I find myself reading the exact same thing. I wish there was a way to stop this.

edit: Thanks to those commenters who mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote - It's nice to be able to properly refer to that which I despise.

The images are labeled for accessibility reasons; they're used as fallback descriptions for figures and images. The slides are wrapped with `<figure>` tags, and the captions with `<figcaption>` tags. They're so that screen readers can interpret the figure, which is why the text is often redundant.

I guess Medium should offer a visually-hidden style then.

...But images have the alt attribute when you want to help screen readers without cluttering things up for people who read the image.

These look like they where adapted from the talk linked bellow, and each slide image has a description probably for accessibility (screen readers).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZmUwXEiPm4

Those appear to be be slides from the talk that's the original form of this article.

This doesn't necessarily justify the first slide's presence at the very beginning, but it might explain it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote

I think they're more useful in a newspaper because they can catch the eye as the reader scans the page. On the web they are fairly useless.

> I've always disliked the "BIG TEXT CHOPPED-OUT BUT YOU'LL READ IT BELOW AGAIN IN JUST A SECOND" paradigm in magazines and newspapers.

Just came here to say you're not alone; I've always hated this too, and I really wish it hadn't gotten adopted on the web

It's sort of like reality TV teasers but in printed form. Right before the commercial break they show a clip of something you'll see "when we return."

That text (here and in magazines, newspapers) isn't for you. It's for the casual browser who isn't reading the article yet. It's trying to suck you in and/or give you teensy bite of info even if you don't read the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote

Of course this article format is kinda pushing the limits I agree.

Which is why it doesn't have any place being used on a web page :/.

Why not?

I admit to often reading things that are far outside my wheelhouse, or not always topics I assume I will enjoy. If I start one of these and find myself loosing interest, these quotes and call outs can draw me further in or push me right out.

This is a talk so it makes sense to put the text on the slide and also talk about it.

The image caption, I took it as medium's implementation of although text for cases the images don't load.

In this case they just happened to be similar.

It's like putting a cover on a book that is related to the matter in the book, to keep you reading because you may start getting bored, so they pull out a sound byte. Pretty obvious.

Yeah the picture labels in that article looked machine generated--generc and redundant unless vision impaired.

I always assumed it was to bulk the article out to fit the printed page.

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