Overengineered Anchor Links

It's hilarious reading the other comments. I'm on mobile but my first thought was how interesting and novel the site design was and how clearly communicated the problem they were trying to solve

Cool post! It's refreshing to read a blog that doesn't ask me to subscribe with popups etc and gets into technical weeds

Once I got over my fear of clicking their links, which I assumed would open a new page (but instead just expanded a pane in-line), I really enjoyed it. I’m very wary of opening new pages. (Also, I first tried to hold-click on the link to open in new tab, but it just behaved like regular text and highlighted, which led to a momentary confusion. I would have preferred a more obvious indication of what would happen when clicking, like a down chevron or something.)

Thanks! Site is still in stealth alpha and posted an article here in hopes to get -some- feedback. Didn't expect this kind of anger hahah. Very grateful for the positive comments though.

Im on the fence about pre-opening the 'tiles' on mobile. Do you (or anyone else) have any strong opinions on that?

Yeah, styling it as a link makes it a bit unclear as to what it's going to do.

Thanks!

Thanks for publishing the article. Idk if my comment sounded too harsh; sorry if it did.

If you're taking more unsolicited nitpicky suggestions, imo the ToC items on the left could use cursor:pointer and a background color change on hover.

I'm not seeing them show up, with or without JS enabled (firefox on android). I might suggest having some interaction for non-js users though (details element, perhaps?)

I thought everything was pretty easy to use as soon as I realized what clicking a button would do (a little trickiness if you open the tile while the button is nearly off the top of the screen but honestly really great)

Because I don't know what the drop off rate is when someone reads this, take what I say with lots of salt.

Giving one button as a demo and then saying click on button to close (and leaving it implicit that the rest of the buttons need to be opened manually) seems good? Leaving them closed by default worked great for me!

I also assumed those were going to be links, but after a second of confusion I really liked the side pane with animations. It adds a lot to the article and it's more pleasant than the usual alternatives (lightbox on top of the text, or opening a bunch of tabs).

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how else you'd visually communicate "this bit is interactive on click/hover but isn't a link." Maybe a different text color (without underline), background color, outline (replaced by the colored highlight bar on hover), or a slightly larger and more distinct icon to replace the generic 'image' icon?

> the site design was and how clearly communicated the problem they were trying to solve

I don't agree with either. Even after I enabled JS (no warning) and then after reading the whole page, finally realized that the implementation of popins was completely broken on Firefox and switched to Chrome to reread it (it doesn't help that the first 'link' is not a link†, and the link says it's 'broken' but it means broken in a different way from being actually broken so when you click on it and nothing happens, you infer that nothing was supposed to happen, which is why you were told it was broken...), I still couldn't understand WTF the problem was or how any of this could be remotely justified compared to an ordinary ToC and section headers or anchors.

† I'll just note that I have looked at many, many sidenote implementations (https://gwern.net/sidenotes) and the choice to make your sidenote/footnote link look exactly like a regular link is an... interesting choice.

Incredible work, ignore the naysayers. As I was reading the article, I was thinking "this is hacker spirit". Well done.

Agreed, I really liked how the site looked. I thought it was really slick and I am blown away by the how easy the author added extra information in a blog post. Nice work!