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Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

Excellently made article in terms of web tech. It's media-heavy but loads progressively and fast, the employed effects support and enhance the content, resizing the browser works well even in the middle of effects, it looks nice in general and is very readable - great work bbc team who made this.

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The 2011/2017 before/after images are striking, mostly because they use scrolling to show the before/after effect. I've never seen that before, and it gives a lot of control over the viewing experience compared to dragging a handlebar.

I wish it were a bit easier to tell which parts of the image are showing bombed areas, since it's difficult to tell whether the diffs are due to explosions or natural changes over time.

To the people who make stuff like this: how much time do you put into a page like this? I feel like (in my world) this would require an endless set of meetings, then design + revisions, then programming, and eventually someone would say "this is taking too much time / costing too much."

I can appreciate the achievement, but I closed the article halfway through, because the unpredictable scrolling behavior made me feel a little dizzy. I'd have strongly preferred to grab some widget and swipe back and forth to see the before/after images, instead of having the same gesture, which feels like it ought to scroll the page, instead make some elements move some ways sometimes and different elements move a different way some other times.

> the employed effects support and enhance the content

I thought the scrolling effects distracted from it if anything.

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