Keys, a tour and sources by site

A Ctrl+K that Chrome took

Under a Ukrainian layout the K key gives “л” and / gives a full stop. The search handler compared characters, so it let both pass, and Chrome opened its own address-bar search over the page. The keys are now also matched by their physical position. After that, / and Ctrl+K (⌘K) began to work on every page without the axis: they take the reader to the axis with the search field already open. And “?” on any page opens a list of keys: the page keys everywhere, the axis keys on the axis. While the list is open the axis does not answer keys.

A tour that waits for the first move

The 6-in-1 asked for a first-time reader to be shown how to read the axis, and for a button that shows it again. The tour goes through search, the list, a cluster mark, zooming from a decade down to a day, the record card, the way back and the keys. The “How to use” button sits in the axis footer. After a first look the 6-in-1 asked for one more thing: a step names its period the way the axis labels it (“Jul”, “26”), not as a full date.

Three things turned up after the first version. The 6-in-1 saw the first: on every zoom the tour’s note flashed under the marks for a moment. The cause was the view transition. For its length every mark is drawn in a layer of its own over a picture of the page, and the tour was left inside the picture. Only an explicit z-index on the transition’s group held.

CI found the second. The footer button was boxed and 44 pixels high like its neighbour, and it made the row of links 30 pixels taller. On a 320×640 screen that pushed the axis below the 65 % of the height a test guarantees it. The button now looks like the links beside it, and the test was not changed.

CI found the third as well: the axis’s median LCP rose from 1.85 to 2.43 seconds. Most likely the browser took the note, painted at idle on a first visit, as the page’s largest paint. The tour now starts on the reader’s first move: a press, a key, the wheel, a touch or a scroll. And only if, half a second later, the axis is still at the full range with nothing open. A reader whose first move went into a period or into search stays where they went. LCP went back to 1.85.

The bibliography by site

/sources/ was three sections by kind of source, a few hundred links in each. The 6-in-1 called it irritating and asked for the main domains with figures instead of a split into primary and secondary. Then they asked for cards by letter, as on the other indexes, and then for a switch between A to Z and the number of records.

Sources are now grouped by registrable domain. web.archive.org and archive.org are one site, and every subdomain of github.io is a site of its own. A site that three or more records stand on gets a card with two figures, records and sources, and its documents in a fold, oldest first. At 969 sources that is 63 cards. The other 226 sites sit in one folded list at the end, so every source is still on the page. The page shrank from 96.6 to 58.3 KB gzip. The kind of each source and the records citing it are still on the record pages.

This reversed the grouping by kind that the 6-in-1 had approved on 20 September. At six hundred sources it still read; at nine hundred it no longer did.