Javascript secrets of Bret Victor's homepage
Bret Victor seems to be the sort of guy who makes things for the sheer joy of it. They may not always work brilliantly, but you have to respect the creativity and effort that went into them. When I saw his page I was surprised by how it was achieved without Flash. I think that was the point of him making it: to show that surprising things could be done.
This harks back to those showoff pages at the dawn of the Web, which showed surfers things that surprised and intrigued, and did it without adhering to common design conventions. The sort of page that you raised your eyebrows at and bookmarked right away, because that sure was some genius and artistry behind it there. It's nice to come across these things, especially today when mostly everyone uses major platforms, templates, plugins, and conventions.
Not related to the article. Seems Bret doesn't care much about us Windows users. It's more or less impossible to scroll with your scroll-wheel with that custom scroller. Personally I think he's trying too hard with worrydream.com. I feel it's hard to navigate, with bad responsiveness and clunky, even on Chrome. I believe the bad UX comes from the skeuomorphic design. I've never seen such design work good for a software UI.
That aside, Bret Victor is a genius and I love most of is work. He's a great inspiration to me, and should be to anyone involved in any form of software development.
I have a couple quibbles with the article, notably:
> Special support for Ajax URLs
being raised as an industry standard and a best practice, whereas it's a Google hack of a solution.
HTML5 history.pushState[0] is the proper standard solution, with a nice polyfill[1]
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Manipulating_th...
If I remember correctly the website is actually implemented via openlazlo (http://www.openlaszlo.org/). I remember coming across Bret's site as an example while working through openlaszlo documentation.
I really like his articles but the website is awful. Everything is blurry and the scrolling is broken. On HN when I scroll down once, it goes to the next comment, on this site it literally scrolls 1 pixel down.
To everyone complaining about UX on his site: please don't. Don't even look at the effects, don't think about how it looks, it's irrelevant. Instead, go read the code. And if you want to complain about how it's written, it's ok - paste example snippets and talk about them. Show how you'd optimize this or that transition, what you'd do better. I find your complaints - without these snippets and rationale - annoying and missing the point.
The homepage is unusably slow on Firefox.
For anyone who hasn't seen Bret Victor's mind-blowing talk, here it is:
UX aside, a lot of thought went into this and I applaud the experimentation done in 2011!
He's amazing..I was stunned while looking at his work. Especially learnable programming.