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Comment by jerhinesmith | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate what the omniref guys are doing, but I find these "posts" (maybe not the right word?) incredibly difficult to follow. I can't tell if I'm supposed to read the left pane, the right pane, the bubble? Do I click the quote bubbles? Does the left pane "track" the right pane?

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A little hard to follow? Only because I've never seen it before. This is a great idea.

The publishing of code-as-narrative or code alongside narrative is something that will slip into the mainstream, maybe in our lifetimes.

Already, ruby code (and other similar languages) are nearly understandable by non-technical folks. And consider the popularity of tools like cucumber that involve tests that are readable by anyone.

Imagine a day when code is published on the New York Times homepage, alongside some Silicon Valley luminary's commentary.

Maybe we can get Morgan Freeman to narrate the source code of TeX.

In this case, the "bubble" is the thing...but yeah, it's a little noisy. Perhaps if we fuzzed out the background a bit when the annotation viewer (the bubble) is open it would help?

Please don't do this. It was immediately obvious to me which part was the part I was supposed to read. (And I've never visited this site before today!)

Hah...we'll put it in the "maybe" folder for now.

I personally managed to follow the series without difficulty, though I can sympathize with the parent's sentiment because I felt a brief moment of confusion when the page first loaded. Excellent write up though! Looking forward to going through the rest of the content after work today.

I'm no UX expert, but I think if you want story reading to be a core feature of your product it will have to have a core place in your layout, so not a pop up box. It would replace whatever currently is your main feature (I.e it would become the left bar).

I think the thing to do might be to detect if the page was loaded with the annotation open, then fuzz background. Otherwise, you know what you're looking at and explicitly clicked the open annotation button.

It's great that the site supports such deep linking.

I'm interested in a productive dialog; I'm not trying to engage in an attack here.

Doesn't your suggestion harm the UX for the person who has spent the minute or two required to figure out how to operate the site?

Even from my very first visit earlier today, I found great value in being able to read the annotated code and the annotation simultaneously.

My original comment was worded poorly. Left side blur should be on initial load if the referring url is not from the same site, not every time you open an annotation.

I think they're talking about fuzzing the left pane background, not the code pane.

Yep, that's the proposal I'm making.

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