If you were to try this with real text that you wanted to read instead of lorem ipsum, you’d figure out pretty quickly why nobody wants text to rewrap like that as you scroll. Your eyes would have to rescan the text every time it moved to figure out where you’re supposed to continue reading, instead of just following it in a continuous line.
The author seems to be suggesting that the reason it’s “hell” and “horrible” is that we’re not “used to” it and it’s “rare”, concluding “it doesn’t have to be that way” and “we can go so far beyond that”. If that wasn’t your takeaway, then great—I wish there were more designers like you.
Yes. It reminds me of the bad old days of magazine layout in the 1990s and early 2000s, when graphic designers, armed with the latest desktop publishing software, roundly defeated the conservative forces of authors and readers.
Whatever you might think of that 1997 example, it’s not the same issue, since it’s just a static page. As the page scrolls vertically by 1 cm, the word you’re focused on predictably moves vertically by 1 cm. I assume your quibble is that you might have to follow an odd shape to find the next word at a line break—but at least you know where the current word is.
Whereas in this post’s animations, as the page scrolls vertically, the word you’re focused on also jumps to an essentially random horizontal position (as a discontinuous function of the scroll-dependent widths of all the previous lines). You can’t scroll without losing the place of your current word.
Raserise the text, map each pixel to a particle suspended in a fluid simulation, and let nature take its course. There's a reason they call it text reflow!
TeX can do something like this, namely typeset paragraphs according to an arbitrary \parshape (a fixed one: it's designed for print after all). There was a question on the TeX StackExchange a while ago about making a "poster" with paragraph shapes chosen according to a certain cut-out image; some people were saying it's not possible, so I ended up doing it: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/401604/
Pre-emptive comment: Yes, of course, the logical solution is to scroll text traditionally within a rectangular sub-region. But it's fun to think about alternatives, even if they're impractical.
The usability on the user's has been addressed by other people quite well.
There is then the issue of developers. Who gets the job of detecting which gimmicky shape a screen is? Web browser developers or website developers?
Maybe my viewpoint is from being used to rectangular screens. I'm also not a web developer but mobile. I already hate having to implement portrait and landscape layouts. Please don't add a star shaped phone.
Any UI designers out there want to tackle the mind-bending task of presenting information on a display that's a Mobius strip, Sierpinski gasket, or Cantor set?
