Every time the user scrolls, this site updates a style attribute on the root <html> element with this a CSS variable: --scrolltop:700 (that appears to be first updating to the actual scrollTop value, THEN re-updating the value rounded to 100 increments). So TWO updates to this variable every scroll event.

There's a media query consuming this variable, and doing a calculation:

--logo-y: calc(3em - var(--scrolltop, 0) * 1px);

So every time the user scrolls, TWO variable updates take place, TWO redraws, and TWO of these calculations take place, TWO more redraws, just to center the sunburst background on the logo.

Doesn't even work right on Firefox mobile. The sunburst just stays in the same spot for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. What a waste of cycles.

I remember when 60 seconds was the target time to finish loading a web page with images over a 14.4.

I remember scrolling on an unaccelerated SVGA card and watching the screen repaint.

I remember being impressed at how gopher would only redraw the parts of the screen that changed, making browsing gopherspace bearable at 1200bps.

I remember queuing downloads of shareware games over zmodem and waiting an hour or more to find out whether they would even run on my hardware, and having to go do something else while I wait because my OS couldn't do multitasking and even if it could it would drop bits because the 8250 UART didn't have a buffer.

But end of the nineties and early to mid 2000s with broadband was peak speed!

Website lags scrolling on my desktop too. How do website even manage to break scrolling..?

By being accidentally quadratic or, more likely, naively.

Seems a bit odd to kick down like that - I'd be more inclined to assume it's accidental rather than naive, given the experience level of the author.

They accidentally didn't notice that scrolling is broken enough to bring a supercomputer to its knees?

...it doesn't bring my laptop to its knees, so no, I would wager accidental.

Sometimes I don't even want to know. I once found a website which messed with the scrolling to make it "smoother" - but it did that only when I scrolled with the keyboard (using a Vim plugin). I have no idea how they managed to do that, but at least it got fixed a couple months later.

Centering the background....

> I remember when the internet used to be fast and responsive. Probably just getting old.

This has got to be the most hackneyed comment on HN, and has been for the 10 years I’ve been on here.

Note that hackneyed doesn't mean wrong: just means trite.

It's better to be right than stylish...

It makes HN really dull if every single thread has someone moaning about how the internet used to be soooooo much better.

But, I mean, it's true. The internet would be a better place if it consisted only of POST/GET and static html/css. Javascript made the web shit.

there is the commonmark specification https://spec.commonmark.org/0.30/

I work a lot with common mark and hoedown for work. There's no formal Grammer for parsing markdown unfortunately. The closest thing to what the parent comment is talking about is pandoc which most people are afraid of because Haskell is scary and the markdown format they use is strange.

Also all of the parsers for md are very complicated.

Jupyter-book depends upon MyST-NB (MyST Notebooks) which depends upon myst-parser which depends upon markdown-it-py (which is a port of markdown-it (TypeScript)) for parsing [MyST] Markdown.

https://github.com/executablebooks/myst-parser :

> MyST is a rich and extensible flavor of Markdown meant for technical documentation and publishing.

> MyST is a flavor of markdown that is designed for simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility. This repository serves as the reference implementation of MyST Markdown, as well as a collection of tools to support working with MyST in Python and Sphinx. It contains an extended CommonMark-compliant parser using markdown-it-py, as well as a Sphinx extension that allows you to write MyST Markdown in Sphinx.

https://github.com/executablebooks/markdown-it-py :

> Follows the CommonMark spec for baseline parsing; Configurable syntax: you can add new rules and even replace existing ones; Pluggable: Adds syntax extensions to extend the parser (see the plugin list), High speed (see our benchmarking tests) ; Safe by default

https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it :

> Follows the CommonMark spec + adds syntax extensions & sugar (URL autolinking, typographer), Configurable syntax!; You can add new rules and even replace existing ones; High speed; Safe by default; Community-written plugins and other packages on npm

Hmm, have you tried pulldown-cmark. It's not easy-perse but it's readable and has an awesome interface. Though it's rust so the interface usability might differ for other languages.

Github: https://github.com/raphlinus/pulldown-cmark

I haven't played with too much Rust but any new projects address a lot of the difficulties with dealing with the legacy libraries. Mainly: they're not written in C.

Not sure if it's just me but with Firefox mobile nightly, sometimes when scrolling it instead randomly zooms in a bit.

Wow, I have a bad habit of reading the comments before reading the site, but you aren't kidding. My gaming PC is lagging on this site! It also doesn't help that reader mode (at least for Edge) doesn't seem to work for the site.

>This website lags while I scroll on mobile. I remember when the internet used to be fast and responsive.

Do you remember it being that on mobile?

Because I remember when it used to be a tiny subset of HTML (remember WAP? or early "web" browsers for mobile?) that to add insult to injury still sucked donkeys' balls on mobile, being slow and unresponsive as hell.

Website scrolls just fine (quickly) on my iPhone. I do have ad blockers though.

It scrolls fine on Safari on iPhone without ad block.

It's possible that it's a combination of:

- it's known that iPhone and mobile Safari prioritize user interaction over display fidelity. So Safari prioritizes scrolling over rendering updates, and updates whatever's lagging at more infrequent intervals

- Safari implements CSS var updates differently (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29353136 on what's going on with the site)

Interestingly Chrome Mobile has issues with it while Firefox mobile does not.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

No it's not? It has the word 'standard' but it's a completely different situation.

How many dialects of markdown are there?

A few, but nobody's suggesting a new one.

So, you could say there are competing standards for Markdown, hmm? :)

The comic is about trying to replace competing standards with a new superstandard. It's not relevant.

You're basically pointing to the first panel and saying 'job done'. That's not enough to make it work.