It’s amazing how easy it is to fall into common pitfalls of software engineering, even when you’ve run afoul of them before and you should supposedly know better.<\/p>\n
Today’s pitfall is “scope creep”, where a small, sensible change gradually grows into something large, ambitious, and impractical.<\/p>\n
I needed to add a byline to the end of each post. This wasn’t required when 99% of the posts on the site were authored by me, and those last 1% were unexpected edge-cases where it was usually pretty obvious who wrote the thing. But these days I’m only writing ~75% of them, and so it’s really important to make it clear who the author is. I know from experience that most people ignore the name at the top of the post. So I added a little bio and a link to the author’s Patreon to the end of the article.<\/p>\n
But hey, while I’m here making changes…<\/p>\n
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I’ve always liked the parallax effect you see on some websites. That’s when the main content scrolls normally, but the background scrolls slowly. The effect is to give the website some visual “depth”. It’s also good because – unlike most other HTML bling – it’s not mechanically obtrusive. The problem with animated menus, fancy cursors, fading image effects, roll-out content, and other graphical trickery is that they break from expected behavior and make the site harder to use. <\/p>\n
Say you want to click at the top of a site to go back to the front page, but the shitty Javascript causes a little stutter as your mouse pointer passes over the menu bar. This stutter makes you mis-click into the stupid menu that just rolled out, and now you’re being whisked away to some random bit of the site. You saw the menu had the entry HOME in it, so you try to open the menu again. This time you mis-click because the rollout animation presents you with a moving target. And then you figure this website is too much bother and go somewhere else to read your gaming news. <\/p>\n
But parallaxing is entirely visual. It’s just a moving background. By design, it doesn’t impact anything interactive. This is a good place to add useless effects that won’t mess with usability. And if it fails because of some browser compatibility nonsense (everyone is looking at YOU, Internet Explorer) it won’t hurt anything. The worst-case scenario is that the background will scroll normally. <\/p>\n
That was my thinking, anyway.<\/p>\n
So I looked up how to do the parallaxing effect. Every tutorial began with a “simple” bit of Javascript that filled half a page and looked like obfuscated C<\/a>. I wasn’t interested in those. I don’t like Javascript for a hundred reasons I won’t belabor here, not the least of which is that when your site already runs on PHP, HTML, and CSS, adding yet another scripting language seems like asking for trouble. I know WordPress uses Javascript to accomplish some of its sorcery (like editing comments) but those bits are all safely hidden under the WordPress hood. I don’t want to add Javascript that I’m<\/em> responsible for.<\/p>\n