Why couldn’t they just make it an article, instead of making it an interactive unreadably-painful thing?
Abandoned? Perhaps you have not heard of the United States?
It seems like lots of websites do this kind of thing, making articles flash-filled and showy, when they could just write the damn article and let the words speak of themselves. They should at the very least provide a text-based alternative for people who either can’t or don’t want to read an article through a flash/giffy image…
It is a LITTLE distracting, but I actually thought it was fairly neatly done. Certainly the spacing and chapter divisions help give the eye a rest, at least. The animated divisions aren’t necessary, but they didn’t hurt as badly as, say, the recent New York Times article on the new Whitney museum, which gave me a proper headache despite being perhaps more identifiable as actual content. (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/19/arts/artsspecial/new-whitney-museum.html)
I was going to suggest the use of a service like Readability or similar, but testing it out just now I realise the Guardian’s made it impossible. And for that, I’m definitely annoyed at them.
Eh. just ignore it.
When I read it on my phone, using the Guardian app, it displays as a long article with (rather retro) turquoise and fuchsia graphics at the start of each chapter.
It won’t show at all on my 1st gen iPad. But then most news sites seem to crash it (including the front page of Boingboing, grrr).
@codinghorror will be along to be shocked at your iPad shortly.
Overly elaborate pages like this (or Vox Media features) get copy-pasted into text editors by me.
I think you’re missing the point, it causes@MarjE actually pain. it’s not just an annoying distraction, it’s painful. I’m sort of annoyed by the ubiquity of such formats for longform articles, but that’s not the point in this case.
They should just do what Wired used to do: pink text on a purple background, interspersed with blocks of orange text on a red background. Granted, it was difficult to read, but the splitting eyestrain made it all worth it.
OK, I have no major sensory issues or disabilities, and I didn’t want to read that thing either.
If there was a “printable version” button available on screen, and I could find said button amongst all the visual clutter, I would have read the article.
Good job, Guardian, you’re literally chasing away readers with your format.
The read mode on my (otherwise disappointing) windows tablet handles it ok.
The article reminds me of this
(from 3 1/2 years ago)
and this
(from the same time)
Keen - the author of Economics Debunked - opinied, quite strongly (very strongly) that the billions given to banks and the financial sector in general would have be far far better spent just giving everybody in the country $2,000 cash (maybe more, I forget the exact amount). It would’ve been much easier to administer, and most of the money would still have ended up concentrated in the financial sector, but on the way it would dramatically boosted spending in the short term, allowed people to lay off some debt, and generally raised standards of living across the board.
Instead we got the opposite outcomes (except the money ending up in the financial sector. That bit worked as planned). Yay?
Well, I don’t know from “Notes.app” but that advice is still useable, 'cause I always have a raw ASCII text editor open. Thanks!!!
Oh, it’s a macosx/ios thing. Marja uses a mac. I think it may ues RTF rather than pure text. ASCII, btw, has been deprecated in favor of unicode.
They did that about 6 years ago, with the Big Screen TV Economic Stimulus Bonus. Combined with a strong resources sector, it seemed to work quite well at staving off the worst of the GFC back then.
cc @daneel
Austerity did just what it was supposed to do: concentrate more wealth in the hands of the wealthy, as public-sector property, goods, and services get spun off to well-connected private sector profiteers.
Well, I don’t know from “Notes.app” but that advice is still useable, 'cause I always have a raw ASCII text editor open. Thanks!!!
[quote=“JonS, post:14, topic:56419”]
Keen - the author of Economics Debunked - opinied, quite strongly (very strongly) that the billions given to banks and the financial sector in general would have be far far better spent just giving everybody in the country $2,000 cash (maybe more, I forget the exact amount).[/quote]
If they’d let the Katrina refugees back into their neighborhoods immediately, and then flew over the hurricane-damaged areas for a couple weeks in helicopters, shoveling heaps of ten dollar bills out the doors, it probably would have worked better and cost less than the authoritarian nonsense the US government actually enacted.
Can’t read it. My blockers trounced it.
What’s wrong with plain text and imgsrc=?
