That's just mean. Comments like this ^ sidetrack the whole post from what-could-be an interesting discussion into a group bashing over irrelevant little details.
These kinds of comments aren't necessarily inappropriate here. When someone's writing about "great interaction design", it's reasonable to point out the terrible interaction design of their site. If someone were discussing "great font design" on their blog and using Comic Sans, it'd be pretty surprising if they were not attacked.
Well, if the top comment starts with "holy shit", it typically drags all other comments in the same direction.
Also, questioning someone's font survey by attacking their use of Comic Sans is, bluntly put, retarded. You still need to account for the quality of the content to make a judgement.
Did you seriously complain about someone else saying "holy shit" and then follow it up by calling my comment "retarded"?
And no, it's not "retarded" to question someone's expertise when they're presenting themselves as an expert and making critical errors. Your opinions on fonts are at best suspect if you use Comic Sans for the content of your blog. Likewise, your opinions on interaction design are at best suspect if your blog is rendered as pixelated jpgs, fades in slowly, breaks middle click, and is laid out more like an Apple product page than a page intended to convey meaningful information.
No, not your comment, the ad hominem approach. There's plenty of reasons why Comic Sans could end up on the page talking about fonts. It can be a joke, it can be a fallback font, it can be some hosted template that got messed up.
In this case, pixelated jpgs are probably the fasted way for him to publish the content, fading is likely inherited from the general site template, it is presented unconventionally, but I personally had absolutely no problem reading it. The actual content is thoughtful and it makes sense. So do tell me again why nitpicking on the text fading thing coupled with a holy shit drama is a good way to start the discussion.
I think you missed the point of my comment about calling it "retarded". The issue is not whether you're attacking my comment or the general thought or even me directly. It's that you are criticizing someone else for lowering the standard of conversation and then doing it yourself. This is the same kind of thing the author is being criticized for. If you want your advice taken seriously, you should probably follow it yourself.
> There's plenty of reasons why Comic Sans could end up on the page talking about fonts.
Joke? Okay, but if you made the entire page Comic Sans, then clearly the joke is more important than the content, so I see no reason to take the content seriously.
Fallback font? Then you still suck at choosing fonts, and your opinion is as useless as if you'd made it the primary.
Broken template? Did you not bother to look at the page after you published it? This seems like an unrealistic scenario.
> In this case, pixelated jpgs are probably the fasted way for him to publish the content
Expedience for the author at the expense of usability? Tell me again how this demonstrates any expertise in interaction design. Seems like the opposite.
> fading is likely inherited from the general site template
Undoubtedly. It's still a poor design from an interaction standpoint, both on this page specifically and on the site in general. It's designed to look pretty, which is fine, but it's bad for interaction, which is not fine.
> but I personally had absolutely no problem reading it.
I found much of it to be pixelated and fuzzy. I also found the layout to greatly detract from the reading experience. It looks like it's designed to sell a product by dazzling the user rather than educate the reader.
> The actual content is thoughtful and it makes sense.
I was not actually very impressed by the content. It looks like he drew the Twitter iPad client. I didn't see anything new or innovative, but there's plenty of other discussion here about that.
> So do tell me again why nitpicking on the text fading thing coupled with a holy shit drama is a good way to start the discussion.
Tell me why I should take an author seriously when he doesn't follow his own guidelines.
I'm sorry, I didn't really want for my remark to become the top comment.
I left it intentionally brief and shallow because I didn't want to give the impression that the sentiment expressed reflects my opinion of the entire article. I think the expletive helps convey that it was a unrefined first impression on that single aspect.
I do think that pointing out unnecessarily bad accessibility is a valid statement. Maybe I should have clarified that the content was entirely invisible without javascript enabled, but I am a bit disappointed that we're just stopping to see full-page flash applets masquerading as websites, and are immediately transitioning to reimplementing that same user-unfriendly approach in javascript.
As pointed by others, the site just is a bunch of JPEGs, which is a very bad choice indeed (accessibility, search engine access, speed, etc).
But aesthetics do matter. If done properly, you could just grab the content and use your favority reader with a click of a button in case you desagree with the author's taste.
It doesn't. Content doesn't load here on a FF with js disabled (not that i do this normally, disable JS, just tested it because of your comment).
I think it kind of matters in this case. The "mail has to be repaired" is such an overused term, and seldom the people claiming that even try to give reasons for this ruling. Mail is an asynchronic system for letting people send messages (with attachments) and it works really well. If someone fails to see that, claiming something is broken which most probably isn't and is doing that from a technically broken site, it weakens his point even further.
So mentioning the observation isn't totally out of place.
I ran a website speed test on this page; it performed very poorly (load time more than 14 seconds). Personally, I'd rather see websites with real speed, rather than something pretty that just has the impression of speed.
In my opinion, having a web page fade in is just a gimmick.
What is the difference between real speed and the impression of speed? If it feels fast, is it not fast?
Automated website speed tests aren't a good measurement the way you're using them. They're good for a site developer to find bottlenecks but can't tell you much else one way or the other. Perhaps most of the page load time is spent loading images below the fold.
You're much better just loading the page by hand and seeing how fast the content shows up. And when you do that, the impression of speed is important.
The HN effect completely crashes lots of servers. It's not at all unlikely that the page appears snappy most of the time and is simply so ill-performant at the moment because it was being hammered.
Not saying that's true or false, mind you; Just that when something is on the front page of HN is perhaps the least likely time to gather a representative benchmark.
