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Comment by dimal | Hacker News Reader

While the demo is interesting from a technical standpoint, please don't make buttons animate like this. It seems like everyone is adding nasty purple gradient borders to everything and now they want to animate it. Just because you can do this doesn't mean you should! I'm getting tired of writing custom CSS to remove distracting styles like this from websites.

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It feels like "blink" all over again, although much prettier. I'll probably feel differently about that last part really soon.

What developers _should_ be doing is disabling such animations if `prefer-reduced-motion` is set in your browser. This way, both people who have trouble seeing stuff when there's too many complex color animations as well as people who "just don't want to deal with all that mess" can specify what they want to see, and the code can change based on their preferences.

Unfortunately, I believe for "custom jobs" like this you'd need to explicitly state that you don't want it to occur because it won't happen by default, unlike some other stuff that's more standard in the browser.

It's Flash all over again.

The problem with Flash -- as I remember it -- wasn't the animation so much as how the Flash embed 1) required a plugin, 2) didn't interact as one would expect of a web page (e.g. right click), 3) was slow to load, 4) and didn't play nicely with the surrounding DOM.

I don't think this is the case here. For a CTA button (literally "Call to Action"), I think it's perfectly acceptable to add an animation to it.

Fancy CSS effects are slow to run, they use lots of CPU time just like Flash animations used to.

When I switch from this HN tab to the article page, Firefox's CPU usage goes from 2% to 26%.

Everyone making so much a menace about the 90's coming back. Please let it happen man! it can't be too much worse than this!

My take is the opposite. Please do it, let's stop everybody conform to the same aesthetics, the same button, the same effect.

Please do whatever you feel like doing. If you like the aesthetic and it fits the overall design, why not? Don’t let some HN commenter tell you what you can’t do.

What if I need to draw customer’s attention to something? These things do have use cases just like real world neon signs.

Use a 'new' gif that is animated like in the 2000's =D

Comparing these animated buttons to distracting light pollution is pretty apt.

Drive around some of Vegas and say that all the old incandescent lights and neon are just pollution. Some of it, designed just for eyeballs and profit, actually ends up being beautiful.

Hire a designer and select an attention-getting color? Use a unique shape which is different than the regular visual flow on the page?

The internet is a cesspool of ad-plastered pulsating garbage. Please don’t litter more on the garbage pile.

Some people don't like neon signs. As a business owner, you're free to ignore them.

It depends on the concrete case and why drawing their attention is important, but flashy animation is never the answer, unless it's to indicate an imminent life-threatening danger, or unless your app is a game.

There are plenty of better ways to draw a user’s attention to something. Any half decent designer should be able to do it without this kind of noise. And there are people like me that will close the tab before interacting with the page, so you’ll lose some people with this approach.

At some point, it will be nice to have an "Information Experience Palette" that is in your locked .env.pii.llm personal AI firewall, gateway. All of your digital DNA is held, managed, protected, and preferred by you, in your own, Sound Voice.

So ultimately, you apply the view to the page and the page conforms to your ingestion preference.

I should carry my own 'css' and be able to just pluck any URL and let me speak to my filter on how to display it.

And it will provide a new way to interact with my browsing history - allowing me to recall how that thing from HN from 3 months ago can tie into this thing, and augment my understanding when I can view them next to eachother... and I can categorize them into tags of the same ilk and have a mental rolodex that lets me re-view my browsing history in the UX lens of my choosing.

/edible.

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