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The village and the girl

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The village and the girl

#11

Post by savanaly »

stephengillie wrote: post #7
savanaly wrote: post #5

A living advertisement for browser extensions like Readability, Clearly, etc. that actually allow you to read articles like this.

Or just disable Javascript. Everyone's trying to outdo "What is Code" and so we'll be dealing with this kind of journalistic showmanship for the next few months. Edit: The article is very well written and truly touching. It feels like reading The Good Earth all over again. In another way, it reads like a story about American Settlers from the 1800s. It's sad to hear about people abiding solely through subsistence far…

I just tried disabling javascript but it did not have the desired effect of removing the "parallax" type effect when scrolling. I tried one of the two browser extensions I mentioned, Clearly, and it worked well.

Re: The village and the girl

#14

Post by bruceb »

I will differ from most of the comments here, I enjoyed they layout and thought it added to the story. I am on a desktop with FF.

As for the story it is a solemn reminder millions of people work hard jobs and make life easier for others. I hope Xiao Zhang's life will continue to get a bit easier as the years go on.

Re: The village and the girl

#15

Post by Menge »

Maybe the interface is misguided, but it is difficult to pull-off to this level, and I find that it does give an overall feeling of connection to the memory threads of rural chinese life.

I am blocking the flash content; someone else must claim my great uncle's fortune. But it is still a great improvement on what was acceptable content degradation a few years ago.

(edit- So overall I'd say there is far from anything wrong with this article, and it provides an important type of impression that we lacked when I was studying rural china, decades ago.)

Re: The village and the girl

#16

Post by metasean »

astrange wrote: post #12

I didn't have a single problem reading this article.

Ditto. Normally Ghostery will block at least one script site that is necessary to view pages like this. But this one worked fine, even though Ghostery blocked ChartBeat, DoubleClick, iPerceptions, NetRatings, and ScoreCard.

Re: The village and the girl

#17

Post by __z »

savanaly wrote: post #11
stephengillie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just disable Javascript. Everyone's trying to outdo "What is Code" and so we'll be dealing with this kind of journalistic showmanship for the next few months. Edit: The article is very well written and truly touching. It feels like reading The Good Earth all over again. In another way, it reads like a story about American Settlers from the 1800s. It's sad to hear about people abiding solely through subsistence far…

I just tried disabling javascript but it did not have the desired effect of removing the "parallax" type effect when scrolling. I tried one of the two browser extensions I mentioned, Clearly, and it worked well.

In firefox: View -> page style -> no style.

Re: The village and the girl

#19

Post by nfoz »

PlzSnow wrote: post #9

These "immersive" stories will disappear once the realization that the ROI on them doesn't work. Expensive to create, but no income generated because no-one reads them because they are annoying. The only companies left using them will be those with no concern about ROI such as here; the state-funded BBC. I'm sure it looks good on the designer's CV though. Who cares about the people who have to actually read the conte…

That's what I used to think about all-flash websites.

They did go away, more or less, but only because the Web became that same pixel-per-pixel full-designer-control application platform, with all the same obnoxious problems that made us hate Flash, minus the binary blob.

The overwhelming majority of websites would be better served by simple HTML3 with no javascript at all. Or rather, their users would be better served.

Re: The village and the girl

#20

Post by tokenadult »

bruceb wrote: post #14

I will differ from most of the comments here, I enjoyed they layout and thought it added to the story. I am on a desktop with FF. As for the story it is a solemn reminder millions of people work hard jobs and make life easier for others. I hope Xiao Zhang's life will continue to get a bit easier as the years go on.

One of the things I liked best about this story is that it is based on reporting that has been following the same family over time for many years. That gives the before-and-after aspects of describing development of rural towns in China a lot of coherency and visual impact.

I too had no technological problems viewing the story, using desktop Google Chrome on a Windows PC with a lot of script blocking running.

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