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Comment by shimman | Hacker News Reader

eh, am very biased as I design similar sites but I honestly prefer these to what would be likely string of random social media posts.

I like having relevant graphics stickied while text is displayed alongside it (assuming by blog post you mean the typical page-like top to bottom approach).

edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.

When it comes to web content, I vastly prefer web like interfaces that you can't reproduce in print.

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While I'm not that against to such a web page (when viewing it on a monitor, not a phone) I'd say follow these points:

• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end.

• Don't scale something to the screen size, breaking zoom! Especially don't do it so that when zooming causes a different scroll position and then it all jumps to a different slide. WTF!

• Make it accessible!

If you want to make flashy graphics and animations make a game. That is not meant as to belittle games, I love games.

I don't disagree with those, and I'm able to do them myself but what do you mean by this?

"• Don't hijack any browser functionality. Scrolling shall scroll the document, the end."

How would you consider the page hijacking scroll functionality? You can scroll down normally. There are animations based on scroll position, maybe that's what you meant?

I mean the animated graphics and some other hackery going on when you try to zoom. It thinks to detect a different scroll position and jumps to a different slide. Also means you can't convert it to a PDF or print it, if you want to (though I wouldn't want to do that).

Gotcha, interesting user flow. I've never manually tested that before. Adding it to the list.

I do think the site is a very poor vibed implementation of this FWIW, another hour of manually tweaking some css/js would solve this issues.

> edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post.

The New York Times generally does the "lots of data, text and graphs in a scrolling presentation" tastefully.

Any articles that demonstrate this? Haven't read the NYT in like 15 years. Only vaguely familiar with the data viz that Mike Bostock created while there, and only because he shared them on a defunct blocks site.

This is a great one, though quite old: 342,000 Swings Later, Derek Jeter Calls It a Career (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/14/sports/baseba...)

Another good one from 2025: Who Sits Where In Trump's West Wing (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/21/us/politics/w...)

And one more from 2025: ‘He’s a Maximalist’: Inside Trump’s Gilded Oval Office (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/23/us/trump-whit...)

They have a page where they've cataloged all of their interactive and visualization articles for 2025 here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/22/us/2025-year-...

I want it to be something you could reproduce in print, though. As close to what I'd get putting it in reader mode as possible.

We've spent a long time optimizing the printed word, including pages with diagrams and illustrations on them. You don't need to reinvent the wheel for every blog

I mean if you want print views (reader mode in firefox works well if the dev took the time to structure everything semantically), definitely use the print functionality. Maybe I'm one of the last people that still makes print media queries, but I do find value in them especially since they're quite easy to make.

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