alt Hacker NewsI think this looks great too. Finally replicating the efficiency of newspaper layouts. No enforced symmetry, just content in an optimal space. I want.
I think this looks great too. Finally replicating the efficiency of newspaper layouts. No enforced symmetry, just content in an optimal space. I want.
It looks pretty, but fails at basic usability.
After reading the top-left block of text titled "Optimizing Webkit & Safari for Spedometer 3.0", what the fuck am I supposed to read next? Am I meant to go recursively column by column, or try to scrutinize pixels to determine which of the blocks are further up than the others, skipping haphazardly left and right across the page? A visual aid: https://imgur.com/a/0wHMmBG
Columnar layout is FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN on media that doesn't have two fixed-size axes. Web layouts leave one axis free to expand as far as necessary to fit the content, so there is no sane algorithm for laying out arbitrary content this way. Either you end up with items ordered confusingly, or you end up having to scroll up and down repeatedly across the whole damn page, which can be arbitrarily long. Either option is terrible. Don't even get me started on how poorly this interacts with "infinite scroll".