> The gear icon in the top right seems invisible in my Safari browser
Fixed. Since Safari is the worst browser, you will not be surprised to hear that this is not even the first problem we've had with the gear icon being invisible or disappearing in Safari...
> put the zoom level up a notch, because I find the font size too small
I'd like to increase the font a touch more, but Achmiz says that going a bit bigger is not doable due to fractional sizes and rounding; we'd have to go substantially larger, and that is too large for my tastes.
> I can understand that at higher zoom levels, but at a simple 110% it's frustrating.
This is an argument I've had with Achmiz several times. I feel that there's enough margin to work with at the current breakpoints that you could stuff sidenotes into them and show them to substantially more readers than we do now; he insists that no, there is not, when all is said & done, enough pixels left over to provide adequate, readable, appropriately-margined sidenotes and the breakpoint can't be lowered.
> For one, only some links seem to have them
Yes. You'll appreciate that it's not feasible to put full annotations on every link, or even provide snapshots to popup. So that's why links are marked up with either dotted underlines or pipe prefixes. The markers can't be any more obtrusive because they need to be on most links, and there is no available visual iconography to draw on which might be 'intuitive'. The reader just has to learn what those mean.
(I've been monitoring AI summarization work because with cutting-edge NNs, it may finally be feasible to summarize every link and drop the need for markup - the reader can just assume that there is an annotation to popup if they're interested. Maybe next year.)
> I'm scrolling down, start reading the next paragraph, then, without me doing something, suddenly a popup pops up.
We find this kinda weird because this is just not an issue for us. My mouse fades out when not used, because why would I want it around? Or it's positioned in a reasonable place. The idea that people just leave their mouses in place and scroll without ever interacting with the popups is... untidy.
Anyway, you're not the first person to mention that, and it's not as crazy a workflow as the people who say they highlight large chunks of the screen compulsively (sometimes admittedly for no reason at all, just sorta to fidget?), so this is as good a time as any to address it. After some discussion, we think that the right thing to do here would be to: 1. disable all hover events (uncollapses included) on a scroll event; then 2. re-enable hover on each mouse. This should avoid any interactive triggers while simply scrolling, and re-enable interaction the moment the reader actually tries to do something the natural way. It avoids the overhead of requiring explicit clicks or issues with storing position/velocity like the alternative 'motion intent' approach (which seems like a fair amount of compute), while being simple & robust to any glitches in browser events (unconditionally setting or resetting a single boolean).
> The boxy design isn’t very aesthetically pleasing...The main body imitates in a lot of ways a classical printed product. That, I think, is great. But the specialised parts – the examples, the backlinks, the digressions, the blockquotes, even the inline <code> fragments – are all in that boxy sub-design,
I like it. It's a fusion of technical writing & Art Deco-esque sensibilities, which I think reflects my website's broad two-cultures portfolio.
> In that vein I'd try to use far less boxes but more typography and whitespace for differentiation.
'Use less' is the sort of advice that is hard to debate without specifics like mockups, because from my perspective, I've already tried to rip away as much as I can, and ripping away more either renders things ambiguous in the way you are complaining about for the popovers or will be lossy in terms of semantics. (Even the apparently purely-decorative touches are actually semantically meaningful: the dropcaps, for example, might appear to be purely a book-style flourish, but actually tell you which of the 5 categories of articles you are currently reading.)
The popovers should now jump back to the original position so you don't get that shift effect. And we've also made the background dim/more opaque (perhaps too much) so that it's extremely clear what is the popover and what is the original page.
Fixed. Since Safari is the worst browser, you will not be surprised to hear that this is not even the first problem we've had with the gear icon being invisible or disappearing in Safari...
> put the zoom level up a notch, because I find the font size too small
I'd like to increase the font a touch more, but Achmiz says that going a bit bigger is not doable due to fractional sizes and rounding; we'd have to go substantially larger, and that is too large for my tastes.
> I can understand that at higher zoom levels, but at a simple 110% it's frustrating.
This is an argument I've had with Achmiz several times. I feel that there's enough margin to work with at the current breakpoints that you could stuff sidenotes into them and show them to substantially more readers than we do now; he insists that no, there is not, when all is said & done, enough pixels left over to provide adequate, readable, appropriately-margined sidenotes and the breakpoint can't be lowered.
> For one, only some links seem to have them
Yes. You'll appreciate that it's not feasible to put full annotations on every link, or even provide snapshots to popup. So that's why links are marked up with either dotted underlines or pipe prefixes. The markers can't be any more obtrusive because they need to be on most links, and there is no available visual iconography to draw on which might be 'intuitive'. The reader just has to learn what those mean.
(I've been monitoring AI summarization work because with cutting-edge NNs, it may finally be feasible to summarize every link and drop the need for markup - the reader can just assume that there is an annotation to popup if they're interested. Maybe next year.)
> I'm scrolling down, start reading the next paragraph, then, without me doing something, suddenly a popup pops up.
We find this kinda weird because this is just not an issue for us. My mouse fades out when not used, because why would I want it around? Or it's positioned in a reasonable place. The idea that people just leave their mouses in place and scroll without ever interacting with the popups is... untidy.
Anyway, you're not the first person to mention that, and it's not as crazy a workflow as the people who say they highlight large chunks of the screen compulsively (sometimes admittedly for no reason at all, just sorta to fidget?), so this is as good a time as any to address it. After some discussion, we think that the right thing to do here would be to: 1. disable all hover events (uncollapses included) on a scroll event; then 2. re-enable hover on each mouse. This should avoid any interactive triggers while simply scrolling, and re-enable interaction the moment the reader actually tries to do something the natural way. It avoids the overhead of requiring explicit clicks or issues with storing position/velocity like the alternative 'motion intent' approach (which seems like a fair amount of compute), while being simple & robust to any glitches in browser events (unconditionally setting or resetting a single boolean).
> The boxy design isn’t very aesthetically pleasing...The main body imitates in a lot of ways a classical printed product. That, I think, is great. But the specialised parts – the examples, the backlinks, the digressions, the blockquotes, even the inline <code> fragments – are all in that boxy sub-design,
I like it. It's a fusion of technical writing & Art Deco-esque sensibilities, which I think reflects my website's broad two-cultures portfolio.
> In that vein I'd try to use far less boxes but more typography and whitespace for differentiation.
'Use less' is the sort of advice that is hard to debate without specifics like mockups, because from my perspective, I've already tried to rip away as much as I can, and ripping away more either renders things ambiguous in the way you are complaining about for the popovers or will be lossy in terms of semantics. (Even the apparently purely-decorative touches are actually semantically meaningful: the dropcaps, for example, might appear to be purely a book-style flourish, but actually tell you which of the 5 categories of articles you are currently reading.)