not just you, this is what my other comment is about (indirectly)

I see nice crisp black text on white background because apparently server melted down

I saw that, except half the images weren't loading, and there was just one mouse pointer.

turned off javascript as soon as I saw it. Like trying to read with twenty mosquitos in your face.

hey be nice to my mouse cursor

If you're using firefox, toggling reader view should do the trick.

Distracted me from reading the article, I just started chasing other people around.

That's what's missing. When I click on a pointer, its owner should have the article replaced with a "GAME OVER" message.

yeah....why on earth would someone want their webpage to do this, especially if they have text they'd presumably want you to read?

Have you ever read with other people, like in school or a book club, or been somewhere that there were other people around? It's an interesting move by the author; the loneliness epidemic hasn't gone unnoticed.

eg https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173418268/loneliness-connect...

It's cute, and provides a hint of human connection that is otherwise absent on the web "hey, another human is reading this too!" which you probably know but something about seeing the pointer move makes it feel real.

Probably not the greatest during a hacker news hug of death, but if I read that article some other time and saw one of the moving pointers, I would think it was really cool.

I've been drawing circles for over a minute now and no one has joined me yet, so I conclude those movements are random rather than made by intelligent beings. :)

That makes me think of this old gem https://imgur.com/gallery/BgKFcI9

I did the same for a while while I was reading. From another comment, the position only seems to update once a second, so it'll be hard for someone to notice your movements.

Yep, the website opens a websocket connection[0] and sends the mouse position every 1 second

[0] WS connection is on `wss://tonsky.me/pointers?id=XXXXXX&page=/blog/unicode/&platform=XXX`

yup, pretty annoying

Anytime tonsky's site gets posted here, I'm reminded by how awful it is, which is ironic given his UI/UX background. The site's lightmode is a blinding saturated yellow, and if you switch into darkmode, it's an even less readable "cute" flashlight js trick. I don't know why he thought this was a good idea. Thank god for Firefox reader mode.

I don't think he added moving cursors all over the page because he thought it was good UI/UX, he knows what he is doing.

This is seemingly self-contradictory. Perhaps you could explain your reasoning further?

It lets you hold hands with strangers

You gotta know the rules to bend the rules

It's called satire.

Doing bad things is their idea of fun.

He appears (if his logos are anything to go by) to be a flat UI guy. I doubt any of these people know what they're doing.

I'm having a hard time reconciling "he knows what he is doing" with him making his site practically unusable without a reader mode, which by the way, not every browser supports (especially on mobile).

Don't even think of switching on the dark (night) mode with that attitude! :D

I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek design. I think every modern browser either allows you to turn on reader mode (especially on mobile) or just turn off CSS. This particular article works excellently even in w3m.

> Don't even think of switching on the dark (night) mode with that attitude! :D

:D

> I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek design. I think every modern browser either allows you to turn on reader mode (especially on mobile) or just turn off CSS. This particular article works excellently even in w3m.

Firefox Focus on mobile does not have Reader Mode.

Fair enough. Tbh at a different time I would probably be as pissed at the author as anyone. Might be mood dependent.

I should also add that the night mode won't be as fun on mobile either, just checked and I don't think it works with pointer events for the effect

Fine, sure. Cute - turn on reader mode. Now the images that are supposed to be sitting over yellow background are dark gray images over a slightly less dark gray background.

The decision to design a serious (read: not-tongue-in-cheek) topic with these "quirky" tricks sucks, JMHO.

Works like a normal website with JavaScript disabled. I didn't even know it did fancy junk until reading the comments here. NoScript saves the day again! I don't know how people can browse the web without it.

By using reader mode

It is some time ago since I last used it, but I found that too many websites that I want to read require Javascript to even show you the main body of text, or a reasonable layout. Is that different now?

No. Just whitelist the main domain for sites that are obviously broken. Then try one or two likely subdomains if that's not enough. In the rare cases where it still wants more crap enabled, then it's usually not worth the effort, close tab and move on to something else. As you build up a whitelist over time, it becomes pretty rare that you need to interact with it more than a couple times per day. Yeah, it takes some effort, but it's worth it to nuke cookie banners and sticky headers and videos and all the other crap people do with JS.

I already have that routine with uBlock Origin. I don't think NoScript offers all of uBO's functionality, and I certainly won't do the same dance for two extensions, but I'll look into uBO's abilities to specifically block JS.

Makes sense! I use both, uBO just does its thing and I never interact with it. NoScript handles blocking & whitelisting javascript. It's totally possible uBO has a similar feature and I just don't know about it.

I never understood how people can browser the we WITH IT. Even 10 years ago. today more then ever basically every website needs JS to work properly. I basically never come across a page where I have the urge to disable JS. I have a large list of adblock lists active that also help getting rid of cookie banners and other shit.

I can not imagine manually approving JS for every site. And again doing the inverse and have noscript installed to deny one website a year does not seem to be worth it for me. In this case I can also just use a adblock rule to block that specific script or all .js files from the domain I guess. So I really no not need NoScript.

By default the script for the page itself is whitelisted, it is just the third party scripts that are blocked. This works fairly often, but there are a few sites that you can also globally unblock because they provide value. One example is mathjax, used to format equations on many pages.

Many sites don't need JS at all, like the OP of this thread for example. For a lot of sites, disabling JS actually gives a better experience than leaving it enabled, again like the OP of this thread. It's a trade-off, but I find most uses of JS are so bad it's worth putting up with whitelisting. For example, I don't see cookie pop-ups, I don't see videos, disabling JS kills most of those stupid sticky headers that web designers love so much, and whatever too-clever crap the OP of this thread was doing is completely bypassed. The web is so, so much better with JS off by default.

For those sites that do need JS, NoScript's whitelist feature makes it quick & easy to fix. The first time I visit a new site, if it is obviously broken, then I whitelist the main domain. If that doesn't fix it, then I whitelist a couple likely-looking domains (often sites import JS from similar domains, or from common library domains). That's enough to get probably 90+% of websites working, while still leaving most garbage JS disabled. The remaining ~10% of websites that need a dozen domains whitelisted are probably not worth visiting anyway, so I just move on at that point. Or NoScript even lets you temp-whitelist everything for a given tab and just put up with the misery to get whatever I need from that one site. Since the whitelist persists forever, and I don't visit hundreds of different websites every day, after some time it becomes pretty rare that I need to whitelist more than one or two things per day.

You maintain an adblock blacklist, I maintain a NoScript whitelist. Not so different :)

I'd say this annoying trick is highly appropriate for the topic!

It is obviously a joke (and a good one, I dare say). The fact that people seem to take it seriously says something about the contemporary state of webdesign :)

It would be a better joke if there were an option to turn the joke off. As it is, dark mode doesn't exist and the pointers occlude text.

> It would be a better joke if there were an option to turn the joke off.

As others have pointed out, reader mode works as expected.

1. Not every browser has reader mode

2. I don't think it's a very good joke to post long-form content on your blog with the expectation that it's basically unreadable without a reader mode.

> The fact that people seem to take it seriously says something about the contemporary state of webdesign :)

Mind expanding and what it says exactly about contemporary web design?

Whether I take it seriously or not doesn't change the fact that it's still damn hard to read anything.

> Mind expanding and what it says exactly about contemporary web design?

The same as when political satire is indistinguishable from actual politics. It means that the real things has sort of become a joke itself.

I can agree that most modern web design is bad. I can also agree that the web design on tonsky's site is bad, but OK, I acknowledge that it is intentionally bad; so bad that it's unreadable. I had myself a chuckle now, and next time I see a link to tonsky's site, I'll click on it, chuckle, and immediately leave.

If you don't have reader mode, get a new browser. Don't tell him to make it boring for all the rest of us who behave normally.

Boring and readable are not the same thing. Also, you can edit your comments on HackerNews

Also, I read it perfectly well and never thought about switching to reader. It made me laugh.

It's deeply ironic that an article about dealing with text properly has images which are part of the article text and yet have no alt-text, rendering parts of the article unreadable in reader mode if the server is slow.

Well, I thought it was fun.

>it's an even less readable "cute" flashlight js trick. I don't know why he thought this was a good idea. Thank god for Firefox reader mode.

not even a proper flashlight. it updates when the mouse moves, so you're SOL if you scroll on desktop.

Good times. If you click on the sun switch the entire UI gets zeroed out and you get to use on:hover mouse shtick to read the UI through a fuzzy radius. Is Yoko Ono designing websites now?

It's a joke. It made me laugh.

It's a bad joke. It made me close the browser tab.

> It's a bad joke.

To each their own.

> It made me close the browser tab.

If you can't handle refreshing or merely clicking it again, that's you having a problem, not the site having a problem.

> If you can't handle refreshing or merely clicking it again, that's you having a problem, not the site having a problem.

No, it's the site's problem. The contrast between the blinding radioactive yellow background and the font is eye straining and doesn't meet the WCAG standards for accessible text. And the dark mode is unusable. The joke would be funnier if there was a real dark mode.

You said the joke made you leave. The normal color scheme is not part of the joke, and I'm sorry it hurts your eyes. I won't try to defend the eye hurting.

> doesn't meet the WCAG standards for accessible text.

Oh, which part of the standards? When I punch #000000 on #FDDB29 into contrast checkers I get good results.

The single quote isn't as good but all the rest has those colors.

I'm using the Firefox Accessibility Tools. But you're right, I mistook the accessibility warning for the quote/header text for the body text. #000 > #FDDB29 does pass unfortunately.

Boo! I enjoyed it a ton. More fun than another bland sleek web page.

It's a creative and fun website, just not nice to use.

Yes, reading the article is impossible with erratic movement on the screen.

Yeah, it's extremely obnoxious.

It's fun specially for folks like me who have ADHD. But there should be a button to disable it

I know which site you are talking about before even clicking the article :(

It's quite possibly the worst web page presentation I've come across in a long time - aside from the fact it looks like some bug has caused my OS to leave a random trail of mouse pointers all over the screen, some of them even move around, making me doubt my sanity when I'm quite sure I'm holding the mouse still. And the less said about the colours the better. There's no way I was going to put up with that long enough to read all the text on it.

Too bad the Linux and the Mac pointer look so similar. But when you give them different background colors, it becomes more obvious which platform dominates, like:

  .pointer.l {
    background-color: green;
  }

first thing I did before reading the article, using uBO to block JS on the page

as someone with a visual processing disorder, this is like having a page scream at me. Repeatedly. Never do this