The tiny Mona Lisa faces in the articles are hyperlinks to additional pages: https://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/a_nav/mona_nav/mnav_...
It's a lazy way of writing without concern for whether your readers are familiar with the context you're already familiar with.
> They lay out the theft, public reaction, some art history, then not a single word on how it resloved, who actually took it and how it was found. The only hint was "an antique dealer got a letter".
It's lazy to not include enough information to make a coherent article. Links in this context are for further information, not for basic information needed to understand the article.
"How did you even know that? That honestly would not have occurred to me. What terrible UX."
That's why you're seeing discussion about UX right now. A different subject is in focus.
All media come with some conventions that people are simply expected to know. In the late 90-ies, a blueish border around an image was an indication that it was a clickable link. Nobody ever bothered pointing out that this image can be clicked. Perhaps lazy, I don't know, but then the entire web was guilty.
The web designer didn't account for a world that wouldn't exist for another decade. Nobody expected people to run around with supercomputers in their pockets, equipped with screens with a pixel density more than an order of magnitude higher than was common place at the time, on a screen an order of magnitude smaller.
How many people today take common usage patterns of the 2030-ies into account when they're designing things? Any web pages optimized to be consumed by AI:s running on quantum computers embedded in people's underwear? If not, what's their excuse?
> They lay out the theft, public reaction, some art history, then not a single word on how it resloved, who actually took it and how it was found. The only hint was "an antique dealer got a letter".
It's lazy to not include enough information to make a coherent article. Links in this context are for further information, not for basic information needed to understand the article.