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.
The good “news” is the NYT, as well as most newspapers around the country refuse to provide the format, content, and responsible reporting that the people want, so they will soon self destruct ending the annoying java gadgets. So arrogant they must be thinking we need such a device and that they need to invent and implement it. I love the idea and act of reading the paper every morning as I start my day. Now days, if I do I can rarely finish my breakfast due to the loss of appetite. One final thought. As newspapers fail for not providing the product consumers want and turn to blogs for their news, will Obama provide a bail out keeping a no longer desired commodity alive forcing me to keep paying something I no longer use? (like I california divorce settlement)