Overengineered Anchor Links

Posted by matser 4/3/2025

Overengineered Anchor Links(thirty-five.com)

392 points | 153 commentspage 4

askew 4/4/2025|

It's a shame that the overengineered anchor links in TFA don't work with the keyboard.

hk1337 4/4/2025||

Reading the main content at the bottom right of the window is weird.

kubb 4/3/2025||

Cool I like the exercise in futility :)

cynicalsecurity 4/3/2025||

Why not open a modal dialog instead?

encom 4/3/2025|

The answer to this question should always be "no". Under all circumstances.

anon115 4/3/2025||

can you make them automatically trigger on scroll if you get close to its section?

Georgesortiz900 4/7/2025||

[dead]

miragecraft 4/3/2025||

In the final demo, when I click on "Conclusion" in the side nav, it doesn't even bring the content into view.

meowface 4/3/2025||

I'm sorry but anything that hijacks the scrollbar in any way is just a no-go. You have to not interfere with scrolling. (Taking some other action on the page during scrolling can be okay, but actually affecting the scrolling itself in any way while you are scrolling should be verboten, in my opinion.)

Sohcahtoa82 4/3/2025||

Pages interfering with how scrolling works infuriates me so much that I've often considered writing an extension that tries to disable that behavior, or even compile my own Firefox if I had to.

encom 4/3/2025||

I hope you do. And while you're at it, make it so websites are no longer able to fuck with the scrollbar in any way whatsoever, including but not limited to changing its size or colour.

matser 4/3/2025|||

Lenis.js (smooth scrolling lib) was actually implemented for some technical reason that is no longer required; so might actually remove it indeed.

lugao 4/3/2025|

[flagged]

matser 4/3/2025|||

It's something new IMO but we are definitely working on improving UX still. Fixing the overscroll issue as we speak. I'm assuming you're using mobile, would you prefer it of the 'tiles' all started in an open state?

It is not an experiment in how bad front end design can be pushed to be... Although that would be a fun blog post

meowface 4/3/2025|||

I think the site looks fine. Just remove whatever is changing the scrolling and adding "smoothness" to it or whatever. Showing stuff as you scroll is cool, but interfering with the scrolling itself is not cool.

lugao 4/3/2025||||

I am not on mobile. It all boils down to the way decade old convetions/expectations are broken.

The things that look like buttons (and are spans in the html code, not even anchors!) trigger non-local transitions (the left panel thing) when hovered... and they close the opened panel when clicked, so if I move my mouse to click on it the end result is a panel that flashes.

I need to keep ignoring the usual button affordance of being clicked and force myself to think they are tiggered on hover.

If this isn't bad UX I don't kown what it is.

zote 4/3/2025|||

While you're here the little colored buttons, that expand to show more info are neat (note the first one in this article has template text at the moment) ; and when they expand and highlight the text with color they can clip other nearby text

nkozyra 4/3/2025||

I think you can look at UX like this less like a web page and more like a presentation. In that framing it's more palatable.

In general we consume blogs more like traditional web pages, so it feels ... "wrong," but in some ways it keeps all of the content at hand and lets you navigate linearly or back and forth pretty reasonably, the way you might traverse a PPT.

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