I spent the day browsing the website of Josh W. Comeau yesterday. He writes educational content about web development. I am in awe.
For so many reasons. The quality of the writing. The clarity of the thinking. The mastery of the subject matter. The metaphors. The analogies. The quality and attention to detailof the website itself. Try zooming in to 300%. It still look gorgeous.
One thing that he’s got me thinking about is the place that sound effects and animation have on a website. Previously my opinion was that you should usually just leave ’em out. Focus on more important things. It’s hard to implement them well; they usually just make the site feel tacky. They also add a decent amount of complexity.
But Josh does such a good job of utilizing sound effects and animation! Try clicking one of the icons on the top right. Or moving your cursor around those dots at the top of the home page. Or clicking the “heart” button at the end of the “Table of contents” section for one of his posts. It’s so satisfying.
I’m realizing that my previous opinion was largely a cached thought. When I think about it now, I arrive at a different perspective. Right now I’m suspecting that both sound effects and animations should be treated as something to aspire towards. If it’s a smaller-scale site and you don’t have the skills or the resources to incorporate them, that’s ok. But if it’s a larger-scale site, I dunno, I feel like it’s often worth prioritizing.
Anyway, the main thing I want to talk about is his usage of demos that you can explore. For example, check out his demos of how the flex-grow property works. It’s one thing to read the docs. It’s another to see a visualization. It’s another to play with a demo. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. How many words is an interactive demo worth?
I don’t think such demos always add that much value. Like for flex-grow, I think it adds some value, but not too much compared to a visualization like the one here. On the other hand, the demo for content vs items actually made the concept click for me in a way that I don’t think would have without the demo. It makes me think back to Explorable Explanations along with some of the other work of Bret Victor.
So yeah, sometimes demos really do add a lot of educational value. But even when they don’t, I think that they can also add a lot of value in other ways. For example, by being engaging, or by providing delight.
This all makes me wonder about how worthwhile it is for writers to try to incorporate such interactive demos into their posts. I’m coming from a place where I’m thinking about the fact that they often add a lot of value. Yes, they’re also pretty costly, but if they add a lot of value, I dunno, maybe it’s worth paying the cost. Or maybe it’s worth figuring out a way to lower it. I’m also coming from a place where I observe that people will, at times, put a lot of effort into some sort of written material that they produce, rewriting it and revising it and whatnot.
Then again, it is pretty costly to incorporate such demos. You’d have to learn to code, and be pretty good at it. You’d have to develop a pretty strong intuition for good design. Those are skills that take years to learn. Maybe doing so is worthwhile if your main thing is writing or education, but otherwise, probably not.
Another thing you could do is pay someone who has those skills. Again, doing so is going to be expensive. Maybe the cost is worth it for a large project like a book or something, but for something moreso on the scale of the blog post, probably not.
As a creative solution, I wonder whether it’d make sense to find young people earlier in their careers who have the needed skills and who are looking to get real world experience, make connections, and add to their resumes. Finding such people would probably be a decent amount of work though. Maybe if there was a platform to help? Meh. I feel cynical. Fundamentally, you’re trying to get valuable, skilled labor for free. Feels too much like an uphill battle.
I suppose that like all things you could just point to the fact that AI will be good enough to do this sort of thing at some point. However, I don’t think that observation is a helpful one. The conversation here is about how to improve content that you produce via interactive demos. Once AI is good enough to freely or cheaply produce those demos, it’ll also be good enough to just produce the overall content.
What about people like me? I like to write. I want to produce good content. I am a front end leaning web developer. I think I have an eye for design. Maybe I am the type of person who could take the time and produce these sorts of interactive demos for the content I produce?
Nah. I don’t think it’d be practical. Right now I have other things aside from writing that I’m prioritizing and I’m not looking to spend more than something on the scale of hours for a given post. At other points I aimed to spend something more on the scale of days for a given post, but even that is probably too short of a time scale to justify interactive demos. I think interactive demos become relevant when you’re dealing with weeks, if not months. And so even if you have the skills, I think it often isn’t practical if you aren’t eg. a book author or something.
Maybe there is a deeper issue here. Maybe it’s that we are the kind that can’t cooperate. From a God’s Eye perspective, I feel like I’d much prefer to take 100 authors and have them coordinate to produce 1 amazing blog post than for them to go off on their own and produce 100 mediocre blog posts. But observing this is hardly a solution. If we were able to solve this problem of a lack of cooperation it’d have impacts far beyond explorable explanations.
So overall, I guess I’m not really seeing anything actionable here with respect to the interactive demos.
Maybe there is a deeper issue here. Maybe it’s that we are the kind that can’t cooperate. [...] If we were able to solve this problem of a lack of cooperation it’d have impacts far beyond explorable explanations.
I agree. Cooperation (specifically of good people, as opposed to e.g. lynch mobs) seems like a problem worth solving; I wish I knew how. It seems that many people are generally willing to do good things, even for complete strangers, it’s just difficult to collect all that energy into something coordinated that could shine like laser. Some problems I noticed:
smart people are potentially more useful to cooperate with, but they are also more likely to have their own strong opinions (and therefore less likely to agree to do the same thing), and their opportunity cost is often high (because they are already doing something important)
also the smarter people you need, the fewer such people exist, so we have the problem of them living far away from each other, not knowing each other, etc.
in business, you achieve cooperation by having a plan how to achieve profit, and paying the other people to pay their part in the plan; if your plan is to do something that is not financially profitable, this standard strategy falls apart...
unless the altruistic people donate the money, so that you can pay people who don’t care about the original goal (problem is, donating money doesn’t feel good)
or you find a non-financial way to reward people for participation
if there are too many altruistic people at the same place, this seems to attract predators
I spent the day browsing the website of Josh W. Comeau yesterday. He writes educational content about web development. I am in awe.
For so many reasons. The quality of the writing. The clarity of the thinking. The mastery of the subject matter. The metaphors. The analogies. The quality and attention to detail of the website itself. Try zooming in to 300%. It still look gorgeous.
One thing that he’s got me thinking about is the place that sound effects and animation have on a website. Previously my opinion was that you should usually just leave ’em out. Focus on more important things. It’s hard to implement them well; they usually just make the site feel tacky. They also add a decent amount of complexity.
But Josh does such a good job of utilizing sound effects and animation! Try clicking one of the icons on the top right. Or moving your cursor around those dots at the top of the home page. Or clicking the “heart” button at the end of the “Table of contents” section for one of his posts. It’s so satisfying.
I’m realizing that my previous opinion was largely a cached thought. When I think about it now, I arrive at a different perspective. Right now I’m suspecting that both sound effects and animations should be treated as something to aspire towards. If it’s a smaller-scale site and you don’t have the skills or the resources to incorporate them, that’s ok. But if it’s a larger-scale site, I dunno, I feel like it’s often worth prioritizing.
Anyway, the main thing I want to talk about is his usage of demos that you can explore. For example, check out his demos of how the
flex-growproperty works. It’s one thing to read the docs. It’s another to see a visualization. It’s another to play with a demo. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. How many words is an interactive demo worth?I don’t think such demos always add that much value. Like for
flex-grow, I think it adds some value, but not too much compared to a visualization like the one here. On the other hand, the demo for content vs items actually made the concept click for me in a way that I don’t think would have without the demo. It makes me think back to Explorable Explanations along with some of the other work of Bret Victor.So yeah, sometimes demos really do add a lot of educational value. But even when they don’t, I think that they can also add a lot of value in other ways. For example, by being engaging, or by providing delight.
This all makes me wonder about how worthwhile it is for writers to try to incorporate such interactive demos into their posts. I’m coming from a place where I’m thinking about the fact that they often add a lot of value. Yes, they’re also pretty costly, but if they add a lot of value, I dunno, maybe it’s worth paying the cost. Or maybe it’s worth figuring out a way to lower it. I’m also coming from a place where I observe that people will, at times, put a lot of effort into some sort of written material that they produce, rewriting it and revising it and whatnot.
Then again, it is pretty costly to incorporate such demos. You’d have to learn to code, and be pretty good at it. You’d have to develop a pretty strong intuition for good design. Those are skills that take years to learn. Maybe doing so is worthwhile if your main thing is writing or education, but otherwise, probably not.
Another thing you could do is pay someone who has those skills. Again, doing so is going to be expensive. Maybe the cost is worth it for a large project like a book or something, but for something moreso on the scale of the blog post, probably not.
As a creative solution, I wonder whether it’d make sense to find young people earlier in their careers who have the needed skills and who are looking to get real world experience, make connections, and add to their resumes. Finding such people would probably be a decent amount of work though. Maybe if there was a platform to help? Meh. I feel cynical. Fundamentally, you’re trying to get valuable, skilled labor for free. Feels too much like an uphill battle.
I suppose that like all things you could just point to the fact that AI will be good enough to do this sort of thing at some point. However, I don’t think that observation is a helpful one. The conversation here is about how to improve content that you produce via interactive demos. Once AI is good enough to freely or cheaply produce those demos, it’ll also be good enough to just produce the overall content.
What about people like me? I like to write. I want to produce good content. I am a front end leaning web developer. I think I have an eye for design. Maybe I am the type of person who could take the time and produce these sorts of interactive demos for the content I produce?
Nah. I don’t think it’d be practical. Right now I have other things aside from writing that I’m prioritizing and I’m not looking to spend more than something on the scale of hours for a given post. At other points I aimed to spend something more on the scale of days for a given post, but even that is probably too short of a time scale to justify interactive demos. I think interactive demos become relevant when you’re dealing with weeks, if not months. And so even if you have the skills, I think it often isn’t practical if you aren’t eg. a book author or something.
Maybe there is a deeper issue here. Maybe it’s that we are the kind that can’t cooperate. From a God’s Eye perspective, I feel like I’d much prefer to take 100 authors and have them coordinate to produce 1 amazing blog post than for them to go off on their own and produce 100 mediocre blog posts. But observing this is hardly a solution. If we were able to solve this problem of a lack of cooperation it’d have impacts far beyond explorable explanations.
So overall, I guess I’m not really seeing anything actionable here with respect to the interactive demos.
I agree. Cooperation (specifically of good people, as opposed to e.g. lynch mobs) seems like a problem worth solving; I wish I knew how. It seems that many people are generally willing to do good things, even for complete strangers, it’s just difficult to collect all that energy into something coordinated that could shine like laser. Some problems I noticed:
smart people are potentially more useful to cooperate with, but they are also more likely to have their own strong opinions (and therefore less likely to agree to do the same thing), and their opportunity cost is often high (because they are already doing something important)
also the smarter people you need, the fewer such people exist, so we have the problem of them living far away from each other, not knowing each other, etc.
in business, you achieve cooperation by having a plan how to achieve profit, and paying the other people to pay their part in the plan; if your plan is to do something that is not financially profitable, this standard strategy falls apart...
unless the altruistic people donate the money, so that you can pay people who don’t care about the original goal (problem is, donating money doesn’t feel good)
or you find a non-financial way to reward people for participation
if there are too many altruistic people at the same place, this seems to attract predators