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Comment by social_quotient | Hacker News Reader

This is a great reminder of what can be done by just “rethinking everything” and saying why do I NEED that plugin, lib, script, font lib etc. one thing not immediately obvious to me was that the responsive menu goes to a new page https://sustywp.com/menu/ and because the site is so fast it actually doesn’t feel like a page load. I haven’t really thought about this but hamburger menus get so complex these days it might just be easier to load a minimal page.

Something about this menu approach feels so clever but wrong at the same time.

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The menu on this site is essentially what a website's index page used to be, back in the early days of the WWW. It was, generally, a listing of a website's contents, modeled after the default directory listing that a web server produces.

So this menu felt very normal to me, but it may be off-putting to newer users of the web who are used to contemporary conventions such as slide-out hamburgers (not to be confused with slider hamburgers :-) ).

I just opened and closed it a few times to try it out. Then I pressed the back button several times to get back here, cycling the menu open and closed again.

I'm gonna go with "it's a bad idea".

That's a bug not a design flaw. You could fix that with a tiny bit more JS checking history entries for repetition.

If one really wanted to, couldn't they eliminate menu access from the user's history?

Yes. You can use replace() instead of push().

But there are other issues like bookmarking or sharing the page with the menu open. People won't expect the result.

It's really not difficult to create an on-page menu so this seems more trouble than it's worth.

But would people really try to share / bookmark a page that at that very moment doesn't show the content they want to share?

I think it is a beautiful, simple solution that just works (and also did work perfectly in the past when we didn't have JS)

Yes. If you have ever worked on a site with lots of users, you will find that if there is a way to break something, someone will absolutely do that thing. It might not be super often, but it will definitely happen.

I don't think opening and closing the menu is a realistic test.

Generally when a user opens the menu they're trying to go to a different page.

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