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Comment by valleyer | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic:

1. When I loaded the page, it bombarded me with a banner asking me, "Interested in sports?" (Yes, I am, but I came here to read about English handwriting. Go away.)

2. At the end, it presented me with a "badge" for finishing a whole "book"! Yeah, maybe people's attention spans would be better if they weren't bombarded with little banners at the beginning.

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I did not get either banner looking at the page using Firefox focus on mobile, but this parallax scrolling experience used on this site (and many others)that today's webdevs seem hot to trot over is abysmal. I'm on an 8" tablet and still have to find the sweet spot where the text does not obfuscate the image, so my eyes are unable to quickly dart between both as I read. It's absurd that people think this is a good way to present information. Another commenter replying to you mentioned why not just ditch the JS, and for a site like this I say, right, why not? I'd much rather have the static text and image positions afforded with simple and elegant HTML and CSS tags as opposed to this finicky BS that was clearly tested on maybe one viewport and called good.

I'm torn on point 2... on the one hand, I'm insulted to be "rewarded" for my tenacity in managing to "read" what is basically a very short article with a lot of pictures. On the other hand, I'm working daily with people who refuse to read messages on Teams chat if they are longer than five words and respond either with an answer that proves they didn't make it past the first sentence or with the even worse "quick call?" So perhaps anything that rewards primary-school-level literacy among adults is a positive step after all.

Yeah I didn’t think I needed to be called names (“bookworm”) for reading a whole article on a topic I’m fascinated by. I get enough of that in real life already.

And when I visited the page with JavaScript disabled, it displayed all the text but no images.

HTML has the img tag. There’s no need for JavaScript to add images to the DOM!

Sorry. That was an oversight. Now the text is also generated by JavaScript manipulating the DOM tree.

We really need to start considering these things in the same category as pop-up windows. Browsers need to start killing these things, just like they did pop-up windows in the 90s and early 2000s. Remember when pop-up blocking was a huge feature? Imagine if Firefox implemented that today to block all this crap.

Apply Adguard - annoyances filter list on ublock

I already have that on and it didn't catch this. It doesn't really seem to catch any pop-ups much.

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