4 ms·

What specifically is bad about it?

striking 12y ago
The loss of highlighting text and accessibility (both for the disabled and for the less-tech-enabled). Sure, the site's very pretty. But for someone who just wanted to know whether you had a BS in CS or not, this site is really difficult to use. I googled your site and found this URL that looked like a PDF (http://ericlesch.com/eric-lesch-resume.pdf http://ericlesch.com/eric-lesch-resume.pdf), but it didn't work either. You know something's wrong when your users would rather take a PDF than whatever you're doing. (Also: no robots? Why not? I can't even use Internet Archive to see the past PDF link or the less canvas website, nor can I use Google to search just the text of your site.)
- santoriv 12y ago
  The robots.txt is an oversight on my part. I need to get the site working so it's crawlable using the google ajax SEO spec. The loss of highlighting text and accessibility is unfortunately unavoidable if you are using Canvas or WebGL for rendering. That's the price you pay for having better animation performance - so it's a tradeoff. And no, I don't have a BS in CS. ;-)
moron4hire 12y ago
I think it's pretty neat, but it's not complete. I can't read the entire field in landscape orientation on my phone (Galaxy Note 3). And it doesn't provide a scroll function to compensate.
- santoriv 12y ago
  Cool. Thanks for the feedback. I definitely have some work to do to get it to work on all mobile devices.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    Just remember, even if your system doesn't replicate HTML exactly, you'll have to create something else of equal complexity as HTML and a browser rendering engine to match the flexibility. On the flip side, anything of less complexity will necessarily be less flexible. Though giving up some of that flexibility may not be a bad thing. I don't say this to discourage, as I frankly think the technology in general is headed in that direction and have done my own work in that regard. It would be interesting to see if anyone will create a feature-complete HTML rendering engine in JS. It will significantly change how we approach web development, as the choice in rendering engine would move from the user to the developer.
IkmoIkmo 12y ago
Kills the notion of the semantic web, which kills SEO for your site, but would kill search in general (pending a huge rethink about how search works on the web) if everyone would do it. Not accessible for anyone with accessibility options. Probably not going to work well, if at all, for people with JS disabled. More error-prone, imo. I've had HTML5 canvas projects in the wild for over 1 year working fine, until Chrome updated its browser and it started producing errors for one particular deprecated function. You obviously can build web apps to continue working, but mine didn't out of the box. If you write websites in HTML the chance that your entire website stops loading and working completely due to one issue is extremely small. Beyond that canvas takes a bit more resources which is an issue for mobile. My canvas projects also always sucked up quite a bit of battery somehow on mobile. Lastly, there aren't any huge benefits imo. HTML5 & Canvas are awesome, they have their place, but atm more like Flash: Games, (interactive) Advertising banners, complex animations to create a brand experience etc. But for an actual website? If you can't do it with CSS animations it's probably way too annoying, for example while this website is 'nice', I don't like it. I'd hate to have more websites like this, the animations just get annoying. Animations aren't there to be fancy, they're there to be intuitive. If you have a drop down menu, it may drop down, not because it's fancy but because you understand that it origins from a certain click on an element, and the menu's options are contextually associated with that element. Which is why a slide in or fade in animation would make no sense, it's animating for animation's sake.
lambda 12y ago
It's not searchable. I can't copy and paste text off of it. It's not accessible; screen readers can't read anything off of it. It renders at half the DPI of my screen. At some point, I wound up on a blank screen with no way to go forward or backward to anything but the "create a free website" banner. Haven't reproduced that to give you repro steps, but it happened. It was frequently janky on my machine; animations would hang occasionally. It doesn't work at all on my mobile browser (Firefox); I just get a white screen with the banner at the bottom (it did work on Chrome, but the "Back" button was frequently hard to hit). All of this could be done by animating actual HTML content using JavaScript or CSS animations, in a way that would degrade gracefully for people who couldn't use those for some reason, and which would render at the full DPI of my screen, be copy/pastable, searchable, accessible, and so on. By the way, the editor on makemake.io is fairly impressive. But it seems like it would be more appropriate for it to edit HTML with JavaScript or CSS animations, or SVG, rather than a custom rendering engine using Canvas.
afandian 12y ago
Lots wrong with it. Exactly the things that are wrong with Flash. At the risk of repeating what others have said: None of the text is in HTML which means: - it can't be used by assistive technology, e.g. for people with reduced visibility. People with partial sight use the web too. - it doesn't work in reader mode, which is a common feature of web browsers to use standard CSS to read just the content. - it has none of the benefits of WAI-ARIA - I can't use services like Google translate - that archive.org doesn't work - search engine X can't index it. Maybe Google could one day with the right investment in technology, but there are more search engines than Google. None of the styling is in CSS which means - your animation wastes CPU cycles and isn't optimised - I can't increase the size of the text if I need to if I have poor eyesight (zoom just makes the whole canvas bigger) - on my phone screen text is unreadably small and I can't do anything about it. - you're re-inventing layout stuff that browsers do. I found a layout bug[1]. Reinvents stuff that web browsers, not JS should be handling which means: - I found a navigation bug in a few seconds[2]. - it doesn't work with older browsers. Some people are still using old versions of IE and can't switch. - that standard web behaviour doesn't work. How do I open a link in a new window? - it forces me to use the mouse to click things rather than the keyboard (not everyone uses the web the same way you do) - it doesn't work at all if JS is disabled. [1] Layout bug: load window with small window size, then resize. Some circles move, some don't. [2] Navigation bug: back button doesn't work under certain circumstances. This is a good technical demo, and shows the development skills of the author. Unfortunately it also shows that he has no idea about core web development issues, which on the web is probably more important, especially in a portfolio piece.
- nailer 12y ago
  I see your point, but the text is still text on canvas. Rather than trying to change the world to not use canvas, how about screenreaders get fixed to read fonts off canvas?
  - extra88 12y ago
    If that's text, why do some of the letter shapes have jaggies? Screenreaders use the accessibility tree, a subset of the DOM; this "text" isn't in the DOM, it's not real text. Do you think screenreaders perform OCR on pages? JAWS has added an OCR function but it's only for trying to read a single element containing a picture including text (i.e. images) without a real text alternative (e.g. alt attribute).

The loss of highlighting text and accessibility (both for the disabled and for the less-tech-enabled). Sure, the site's very pretty. But for someone who just wanted to know whether you had a BS in CS or not, this site is really difficult to use. I googled your site and found this URL that looked like a PDF (http://ericlesch.com/eric-lesch-resume.pdf http://ericlesch.com/eric-lesch-resume.pdf), but it didn't work either. You know something's wrong when your users would rather take a PDF than whatever you're doing. (Also: no robots? Why not? I can't even use Internet Archive to see the past PDF link or the less canvas website, nor can I use Google to search just the text of your site.)

santoriv 12y ago
The robots.txt is an oversight on my part. I need to get the site working so it's crawlable using the google ajax SEO spec. The loss of highlighting text and accessibility is unfortunately unavoidable if you are using Canvas or WebGL for rendering. That's the price you pay for having better animation performance - so it's a tradeoff. And no, I don't have a BS in CS. ;-)

moron4hire 12y ago

I think it's pretty neat, but it's not complete. I can't read the entire field in landscape orientation on my phone (Galaxy Note 3). And it doesn't provide a scroll function to compensate.

santoriv 12y ago
Cool. Thanks for the feedback. I definitely have some work to do to get it to work on all mobile devices.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  Just remember, even if your system doesn't replicate HTML exactly, you'll have to create something else of equal complexity as HTML and a browser rendering engine to match the flexibility. On the flip side, anything of less complexity will necessarily be less flexible. Though giving up some of that flexibility may not be a bad thing. I don't say this to discourage, as I frankly think the technology in general is headed in that direction and have done my own work in that regard. It would be interesting to see if anyone will create a feature-complete HTML rendering engine in JS. It will significantly change how we approach web development, as the choice in rendering engine would move from the user to the developer.

IkmoIkmo 12y ago

Kills the notion of the semantic web, which kills SEO for your site, but would kill search in general (pending a huge rethink about how search works on the web) if everyone would do it. Not accessible for anyone with accessibility options. Probably not going to work well, if at all, for people with JS disabled. More error-prone, imo. I've had HTML5 canvas projects in the wild for over 1 year working fine, until Chrome updated its browser and it started producing errors for one particular deprecated function. You obviously can build web apps to continue working, but mine didn't out of the box. If you write websites in HTML the chance that your entire website stops loading and working completely due to one issue is extremely small. Beyond that canvas takes a bit more resources which is an issue for mobile. My canvas projects also always sucked up quite a bit of battery somehow on mobile. Lastly, there aren't any huge benefits imo. HTML5 & Canvas are awesome, they have their place, but atm more like Flash: Games, (interactive) Advertising banners, complex animations to create a brand experience etc. But for an actual website? If you can't do it with CSS animations it's probably way too annoying, for example while this website is 'nice', I don't like it. I'd hate to have more websites like this, the animations just get annoying. Animations aren't there to be fancy, they're there to be intuitive. If you have a drop down menu, it may drop down, not because it's fancy but because you understand that it origins from a certain click on an element, and the menu's options are contextually associated with that element. Which is why a slide in or fade in animation would make no sense, it's animating for animation's sake.

lambda 12y ago

It's not searchable. I can't copy and paste text off of it. It's not accessible; screen readers can't read anything off of it. It renders at half the DPI of my screen. At some point, I wound up on a blank screen with no way to go forward or backward to anything but the "create a free website" banner. Haven't reproduced that to give you repro steps, but it happened. It was frequently janky on my machine; animations would hang occasionally. It doesn't work at all on my mobile browser (Firefox); I just get a white screen with the banner at the bottom (it did work on Chrome, but the "Back" button was frequently hard to hit). All of this could be done by animating actual HTML content using JavaScript or CSS animations, in a way that would degrade gracefully for people who couldn't use those for some reason, and which would render at the full DPI of my screen, be copy/pastable, searchable, accessible, and so on. By the way, the editor on makemake.io is fairly impressive. But it seems like it would be more appropriate for it to edit HTML with JavaScript or CSS animations, or SVG, rather than a custom rendering engine using Canvas.

afandian 12y ago

Lots wrong with it. Exactly the things that are wrong with Flash. At the risk of repeating what others have said: None of the text is in HTML which means: - it can't be used by assistive technology, e.g. for people with reduced visibility. People with partial sight use the web too. - it doesn't work in reader mode, which is a common feature of web browsers to use standard CSS to read just the content. - it has none of the benefits of WAI-ARIA - I can't use services like Google translate - that archive.org doesn't work - search engine X can't index it. Maybe Google could one day with the right investment in technology, but there are more search engines than Google. None of the styling is in CSS which means - your animation wastes CPU cycles and isn't optimised - I can't increase the size of the text if I need to if I have poor eyesight (zoom just makes the whole canvas bigger) - on my phone screen text is unreadably small and I can't do anything about it. - you're re-inventing layout stuff that browsers do. I found a layout bug[1]. Reinvents stuff that web browsers, not JS should be handling which means: - I found a navigation bug in a few seconds[2]. - it doesn't work with older browsers. Some people are still using old versions of IE and can't switch. - that standard web behaviour doesn't work. How do I open a link in a new window? - it forces me to use the mouse to click things rather than the keyboard (not everyone uses the web the same way you do) - it doesn't work at all if JS is disabled. [1] Layout bug: load window with small window size, then resize. Some circles move, some don't. [2] Navigation bug: back button doesn't work under certain circumstances. This is a good technical demo, and shows the development skills of the author. Unfortunately it also shows that he has no idea about core web development issues, which on the web is probably more important, especially in a portfolio piece.

nailer 12y ago
I see your point, but the text is still text on canvas. Rather than trying to change the world to not use canvas, how about screenreaders get fixed to read fonts off canvas?
- extra88 12y ago
  If that's text, why do some of the letter shapes have jaggies? Screenreaders use the accessibility tree, a subset of the DOM; this "text" isn't in the DOM, it's not real text. Do you think screenreaders perform OCR on pages? JAWS has added an OCR function but it's only for trying to read a single element containing a picture including text (i.e. images) without a real text alternative (e.g. alt attribute).