IV1 min
On candlelight and latency
Every click on a web page comes with a delay. Cut whatever waiting you can; for the fraction of a second that’s left, let people see what it’s doing.
How far does a candle’s light have to travel before it is seen? Across a dark room, a few nanoseconds. But the eye takes minutes to adjust to the dark. The moment a room seems to light up is usually not when the light arrives, but when the eye is ready.
Every click on a web page comes with a delay. Engineering treats it as the enemy: under a hundred milliseconds, and the shorter the better. This site works on it from both ends.
At one end, the wait gets shorter. Rest the pointer on a link and the browser starts preparing that page in the background; point at a work on the wall and its page gets ready too. By the time you click, most pages are already there.
At the other end, the wait that’s left gets a shape. Open a work and the crystal folds away, and the work lifts off the wall and flies to its place on its own page; come back, and it flies home the same way. Go to any other page and the next one grows out of a lancet window from the point you clicked. That fraction of a second was never going to be saved; now you can see what it’s doing.
When the page changes, its frame stays perfectly still: the tags at the top left, the sections at the top right, the thin border round it all. Only the content moves.