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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

Lots of very interesting content, especially the images, and for some stupid reason they decided to reinvent a way to display images and text together on a website. As a result I stopped reading after having clicked on a text box in order to be able to read it all (otherwise some of it was lost below the window I had to view it in), and then there was no back button to return to where I was at.

Great content. Could have been very well served up by even (perhaps especially) a static web page. Reinventing how web pages work makes it not worth the effort, and I leave.

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Before this I hadn't known how much I like to go back and forth between the text and picture, sometimes just skimming so I can interpret the picture, then maybe reading more carefully, etc. When the text covers the image, sometimes even adding a scroll bar, that really increases the friction.

Well, it is a learning experience in more ways than one. I was just getting to this part of the war in Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast so it was great to look at a good photo collection.

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-51-bluepr...

I actually like the fresh approach to telling a story they're experimenting with, but they do have some bugs. Specifically that pop-over dialog you're talking about - if you set the window to half-size, a close button appears that apparently is getting lost in the responsive layout breakpoints. Pressing Escape will also close it.

If the site owner ends up visiting - please consider using some form of javascript routing or html5 history tied in to any full-page repaints to allow for backing out and using native browser functionality! Interesting page that I'll be checking back to later at any rate.

I am the founder of History Lapse. I have fixed the bugs, now the modal/gallery that pops up has the "close" icon visible. I'm working daily on adding new content and improving the layout presentation. Regarding the "fresh approach to telling the story" here is our whitepaper that explains why History Lapse could be a great tool: https://en.historylapse.org/whitepaper

...or maybe just put p-tags and img-tags right next to each other, which works perfectly fine in any browser ever.

I must admit I liked it. A different way to consume the written content by looking at the pictures.

Currently I'm reading Martin Gilbert's "The First World War: A Complete History". It's great to be able to put pictures on what I've read already. With hindsight it's mind-boggling to know that Germans (and Austrians) expected a very quick war, and they disregarded a lot of warning.

If the text is larger than the area designated for the image there is built-in support for scroll. Also, a decent resolution is needed to have a great user experience. If you click on an image a gallery opens up. You can use the ESC key to return. On the content side, we use great resources that go through a diligent process of synthesis.

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