I hate the cruft on simple news articles, but I am completely fine in this case for a special feature like this. The images/videos were beautiful and all served a purpose, and it was mostly lazy-loaded. Yes some initial load time, but a very good user experience.

I was really blown away by how much care went into making it perfect on mobile view for both orientations. Each photo is positioned differently to ensure best composition.

But it does feel a but clunky and that size is rather shocking.

Yeah, they've done an impressive job on mobile as well. The numbers I posted are on a desktop machine. I've checked, and it seems to weigh in at only 1.1 Mb on mobile. Pretty neat.

Text only version:

http://pastebin.com/raw/A8T4MRGD (without text blurb)

http://pastebin.com/raw/t0CG2tzg (with text blurb)

http://pastebin.com/raw/Ud4Vc2hp (python code used to extract this)

bugs (won't fix):

- text blurb is not printed for items without g-secondary-name

- character encoding is wrong

> This is a beautiful page, but my god, is it heavy

I'm already looking forward to the Oculus Rift version :)

stop trying to make Oculus Rift a thing

Upvoted for the Mean Girls reference. Oculus Rift is going to be a real thing, though, whether we like it or not.

Oculus Rift's founder said that Virtual Desktop use of the Rift is "not a focus for us right now" in a Reddit AMA yesterday - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3zt7ul/i_am_palmer_lu...

Followed by a comment saying web browsing in a Virtual Desktop style environment on the Rift isn't very good, and can't be due to screen resolution limitations.

That is unfortunate. But good to know, thanks.

Just wait until you can sit behind your computer and develop stuff on a beautiful beach, and use a big screen, all embedded into the VR world.

It would sure beat the crap out of my current desktop backdrop, which is mostly covered by windows anyway :)

Just wait until you walk into the family room in 5 years and each person is on his own headset doing his own thing. I love the immersion, but you need to retain a sense of shared experience that we have already lost with time shifting/binge watching.

While 31 megs is quite a lot indeed, there is also good amount of content on the page too. I find it far more offensive when pages use couple megs for some short news article with maybe two small pictures.

noscript+adblock wins again! 67K for me.

To be fair, I've had to spend some time training my adblock to handle nytimes

care to share your black/white lists?