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Overengineered Anchor Links

(thirty-five.com)
392 points matser | 3 comments | 03 Apr 25 14:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.489s | source
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LinuxAmbulance ◴[03 Apr 25 16:20 UTC] No.43571959[source]▶
As a backend person, sometimes I look at what's being done for front end stuff and pull back in ever so slight horror.

It's an excellent article, and the work within is very well done, but there's a part of me that screams "Why would you introduce this much complexity for what should be a simple scroll?" (overcoming technical hurdles to produce the desired end result aside).

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1. madeofpalk ◴[03 Apr 25 20:09 UTC] No.43574744[source]▶
I think the article does a pretty good job of explaining the gap between what can happen easily, and what a 110% over engineered "perfect" solution is to a UX problem.

Building excellent user interfaces is hard, regardless of the technical stack. You have to sweat a lot of the finer details, break out of any platform default behaviour where appropriate, and over engineer something in service of building a 'delightful' user experience.

Or, you can do as most do, and just not do this. #anchor-links with `scroll-behavior: smooth;` CSS will get you the basic smooth scrolling.

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2. maccard ◴[03 Apr 25 23:06 UTC] No.43576542[source]▶
The really hard part of that is that if you can’t build an excellent interface, you will build a worse one than if you used the native interface. So you either need to be prepared to sweat every last detail forever.
3. DavidVoid ◴[04 Apr 25 23:15 UTC] No.43588726[source]▶
Using #anchor-links that show up in the URL (but not the browser navigation history) should really be the UX baseline for acceptable anchor link implementations. I hate it when long pages don't allow you to actually link specific sections.