The Blog that Noone Reads

“The best feelings are those that have no words to describe them” – Michelle Hammersley

The only reason I could imagine for justifying this “clever” bit of JavaScript is that the New York Times thinks its readers are idiots. Selecting any word brings up this little question mark bubble. Clicking on that will take you to the definition of the selected term. To me, this means that they think I’m unlikely to know the definitions of the words in their columns and am incapable of looking them up myself. As a Mac user, I know that I can use ⌘⌃D to bring up the system’s dictionary widget without taking me away from my reading. I don’t know if other operating systems provide similar functionality but Google will surely define words for you no matter what platform you use.

It also suggests that I’m going to use this feature so often that it’s worth breaking the text selection features of my operating system and browser. When reading content on noisy web pages like NYT’s, I tend to select the content as I’m reading through it. On every other website, triple-clicking on a word will select the surrounding paragraph. On NYT, it will either a) quickly select everything, then deselect it or b) accidentally trigger the stupid dictionary lookup feature and transport me somewhere else. Neither of these things aids my ability to read the article.