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Comment by notachatbot1234 | Hacker News Reader

A webpage that uses numeric identifiers for external references that are found only when scrolling to the very bottom of the page and show their URLs as plain text. Now that is a train wreck.

Hyperlinks are the cornerstone of the web. Don't be afraid of using them!

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I think it's an intentional aesthetic choice[0].

Hyperlinks would be convenient, but something about the raw text / ascii art vibe makes me happy everytime I read a blog post from j3s even if it doesn't have the conveniences of the modern web.

[0] https://j3s.sh/about.html

Links are a convenience of the ancient web.

Haha, ok that's fair enough! I guess what I meant was something like "conveniences that are on most other contemporary websites"

Hyperlinks are not modern web though.

They in fact predate the modern or even ancient WWW.

What?

You mean footnotes? As they have been used for centuries in print?

The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, that is out of the scope of the original text. Ideally on a website meant for computer screens you wouldn't have them on the end, but in the margins, next to the information, but for short stuff it is okay to put them at the end of the chapter – bonus points if the reference numbers can be clicked and take you to the foot note, extra bonus points if there is an arrow taking you up again.

But this is scientific literature style writing, not everything needs footnotes.

> The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context,

  <a href=“Foo” title=“go to Foo” />

will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)

> will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)

"hover" has no meaning on touch-based interfaces.

On my touch-based device a long-press seems to work the same as a hover.

You should see the title text if you long-press on the link, no?

On iOS it opens the link in an pop-in.

That sounds even better?

Good to use I guess, but you can't rely on that with the likes of smartphones and tablets.

> The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context

It's possible to 'link' to a html tag, so the page jumps to the bottom, where the additional context is, much like wikipedia does

Yeah, if you read my post again, you will find that I mentioned this already.

Right, sorry. My only defense is that I just woke up half-dead

It happens to the best of us : )

Also using a monospaced font for both the written text and command line output is certainly a choice. I get that it is often an aesthetic choice, but given that a blog post is written with the idea to be read, one I don't think is a particularly good one. Although the last time I made a remark about that on HN it became clear to me that a lot of people don't see the issue. Even if there are decades worth (at this point) of research that makes it clear that a sans serif font (or even a serif font on modern displays) works better for readability. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It is clear that the author is very explicitly going for the aesthetics of a terminal, given that all formatting of the text is ASCII based down to the line length being hard coded as if we are dealing with a hard limit of columns.

Personally, I'd prefer something more like this: https://www.creesch.com/dump/img/img_66c3127604542.png.

Agreed. And having the link at the bottom as https://archive.is/XYABC without information about the link to also a questionable choice.

I did like the little CSS animation, though. The fish bounces without JavaScript!

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