> After 25 years, why do web designers need to create their own page transition mechanics for long-form articles
As far as I am concerned those things only exist to inflate ad views, they have negative usability impact.
I don't really see why a long document should be broken up in pages to be readable.
> The same with photo galleries - after 25 years, why isn't there a standard user experience for viewing photos related to articles?
There is one: right click → open in new tab. It work very well, much better than the jquery kludges that people come up with.
> In fact, why do we need to write CSS to create a basic readable document in the first place? Why doesn't HTML/CSS default to a high-end and legible reader experience out-of-the-box for basic text?
I find plain un-styled HTML to be much more readable than the tiny light gray webfont on white background that designers usually settle for these days.
> There is one: right click → open in new tab. It work very well, much better than the jquery kludges that people come up with.
Except when people nest the images as deep as posible and overlay other elements in front of the images so you can't simply right click the image, you have to inspect source and hunt for that image URL (or check resources tab in developer mode, or whatever).
That usually happens because someone has decided they need some special javascript "gallery" for the user.
Twitter's default user timeline is the worst example of this that I know.
As far as I am concerned those things only exist to inflate ad views, they have negative usability impact. I don't really see why a long document should be broken up in pages to be readable.
> The same with photo galleries - after 25 years, why isn't there a standard user experience for viewing photos related to articles?
There is one: right click → open in new tab. It work very well, much better than the jquery kludges that people come up with.
> In fact, why do we need to write CSS to create a basic readable document in the first place? Why doesn't HTML/CSS default to a high-end and legible reader experience out-of-the-box for basic text?
I find plain un-styled HTML to be much more readable than the tiny light gray webfont on white background that designers usually settle for these days.