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Comment by JonSkeptic | Hacker News Reader

Woah. This is a pretty cool reactive article. It's the first one that I've personally encountered which reacts like it's supposed to, engaging me as I read.

Congratulations to whoever put this together, it was very well done.

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I agree...except that if you select any text it prompts you to tweet it. For readers that compulsively select text as they read (like me), it's infuriating.

I'm in the same boat, I've considered looking for a Chrome extension to kill all scripts that do this. I've used text selection to mark my place for longer than I can remember and all the popups are starting to get extremely annoying. I fear that I am in the minority when it comes to this though...

I've always done that and I just checked the comments to see if someone else complained about that horrible flaw.

How on earth did they think that text selection as an event to open a popup is a good idea?!

A small, but vocal minority.

I don't think it's a small minority. I'd say every 2 or 3 of 5 heavy computers users I know do this.

I'm not one of them (I do it, just rarely), and I've gotta say it annoys the hell out of me too. Totally unnecessary distraction is what it is.

It is a classic design failure mode - form over function. It may even be the most common category of design failure out there.

Does it at least stop, when you tweet?

This happened to me 5 or 6 times before I had the wherewithal to kick the habit.

This is probably the coolest site I have seen in terms of reactiveness. They even had the insight to have the backgrounds of the videos the same color as the site background. Awesome!

From the bottom of the article:

Video: Bob Sacha

Production: Kenan Davis, Nadja Popovich, Kenton Powell, Ewen MacAskill, Ruth Spencer, Lisa van Gelder

Additional Production: Spencer Ackerman, Kayla Epstein, Paul Lewis, Amanda Michel, Katie Rogers, Dominic Rushe

Also:

By EWEN MACASKILL and GABRIEL DANCE

Produced by FEILDING CAGE and GREG CHEN

Transcends the genre to feel more like a museum exhibit than a news article. I love it.

Yeah, very well designed and with proper HTML video.

This might be the coolest news article layout I've seen...It's awesome to see HTML5 video used in an unobtrusive, classy way like this.

I was also excited to see they're using Video.js, with a super subtle theme that matches the rest of the site (when controls are showing). Really well done.

Since most news and media sites are plagued by buggy Flash video players which barely if ever work for me on Linux, this in contrast was really refreshing.

Shouldn't auto-play, though. That is never OK.

Normally I would completely agree. However, since it doesn't autoplay until the active video is fully on screen and there is a prominent link to turn autoplay off right next to the video control, I'm willing to forgive the use of autoplay this time.

All Flash video for me, FF24 on Linux. Thankfully, because Flashblock did its thing and suppressed it all. What an horrific example of presentation over content.

Anyway there is no 'HTML5 video'. It's H264, or VP8, or whatever.

No Flash for me there at all. I checked the video - it was Theora/Vorbis (OGV). I wonder how you got Flash instead.

There is HTML video - the video tag. No Flash attached.

I agree. Anyone have any knowledge of the tools used to create this?

The video player is Video.js with light styling (or controls disabled entirely). Other than that it's all CSS and some JS to trigger events (such as play/pause in the player at scroll points).

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