Hello! author here, i just wanted to address a few things i've seen in the comments:<p>* i absolutely built this for fun, it's an idea i had late at night and needed to scratch that itch<p>* the scolling sucks, laying out arbitrarily sized articles into a given layout is a challenge, and the scrolling hides a lot of the sins. I'm going to switch to truncating articles this evening, and linking to a single article page.<p>* thanks for the suggestions on hyphenation, i've been playing with a few different approaches but none have worked with all the browsers i tried, i'll give a few suggestions a go this evening!
The content is wrapping at every character, rather than on word boundaries or with hyphenation.<p>The relevant styles:<p><pre><code> .subcol {
hyphens: auto;
word-break: break-all;
}
</code></pre>
`word-break: break-all` should be replaced with `overflow-wrap: break-word`. Those two properties are quite subtle in their meaning and interactions.
Looks cool, just one suggestion about the photos: that effect looks like the dithering of a dot matrix printer and not like a newspaper photo, for that I would go with this kind of effect: <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/474x/9d/76/f0/9d76f0c303e7ea8352d10465d8462b5d.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.pinimg.com/474x/9d/76/f0/9d76f0c303e7ea8352d10465d...</a> - I think it's called a "screening" effect?
I remember the Wall Street Journal's tablet apps having a layout just like this, so it resembled their broadsheet look. It was a pleasure to read, as clicking on individual stories took you to the full story, still laid out like a newspaper, and not to their website inside of a web wrapper view.<p>For whatever reason, they changed that and now the app looks like their website, except with more ads and tracking.
You might have to be a subscriber to access it, but I suggest taking a look at the L.A. Times enewspaper for inspiration. It’s like a full color scan of the newspaper. If you click in an article, you are taken to a separate page to read the article in full.<p><a href="https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx?pubid=50435180-e58e-48b5-8e0c-236bf740270e" rel="nofollow">https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/latimes/default.aspx...</a>
Could work nicely with that eink project that was showing the NY Times full size. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22831323</a>
Not sure if I’d use it with the scrolling, since this format is ill suited for smaller screens, but I love this idea!<p>One more suggestion for you to consider: a variant where each article is a link that takes the reader to a separate article page (like a normal web page) may be good. The use case is to have this print layout to skim through headlines and snippets, and dig into an article by itself if one wants to read more (and the article doesn’t fit within the non-scrolling area).
I'm interested in the concept, but I think the execution needs some improvement to be comfortable. For instance, no actual online newspaper right now has internal scrollbars; there are probably reasons for this.<p>Online newspapers look something like print newspapers, but the most successful designs are successful at adapting the design for the particular affordances of the screen. (Granted, internal scrollbars ARE something you can't do in print, unique to the screen! They just aren't, I think, something anyone wants...)
This is really cool! It would be nice to see h tags used for article headings. That way people using assistive technology can navigate around faster.<p>And this may be a good opportunity to use the article tag.
This seriously needs some paragraph breaks in the articles. Every article reads like one huge sentence.<p>I think print newspapers do this with a slight indent to every paragraph.
Pretty sure it violates copyright of the publishers.<p>Given that Google is not allowed to show more than the headline and a few words in their search results in the EU, I suspect this is just plain illegal.<p>This is sad. We should have better laws. Hope you don't get sued.<p>EDIT: Please let me know if my understanding is incorrect.
If you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all :)<p>That said; I've been on HN long enough where news sites (some of which I worked at) took this approach on some products where they directly took print-styles and applied them digitally. They were vocally criticized (rightly so) for completely mis-understanding the new digital medium.<p>This is a fun and interesting project - buts its entirely unusable and provides a very poor reading experience.<p>Among many other points, it misses the point that the full-page physical newspaper was entirely scannable in large areas. This is the opposite of that.<p>Kudos to the developer trying something for fun but I hope this isn't a serious approach to reading news.
Reminds me of this old Mac and iPad app: <a href="https://acrylicapps.com/pulp/" rel="nofollow">https://acrylicapps.com/pulp/</a>
Funny how this is a good settling of information presentation .. most websites are low signal high noise (visuals count as noise for me now, I'm old).
Unfortunately images look like crap, due to them being way too low resolution.<p>Probably because the images used are dithered and upscaled from small original images.