The only person who wants a carousel on your site is you. That’s it. It’s a self-serving vanity project so that you can showcase all of your babies at the same time without telling the world which one is your favorite.
Ethan is understandably dubious about Google’s recent announcement regarding the relaxation of the AMP’s iron fist.
Because it’s great to hear the AMP team make some overtures toward a more open web—and personally, I’d like to thank them sincerely for doing so. But if we’re swapping one set of Google-owned criteria for another set of slightly more permissive Google-owned criteria, I’m not sure how much will have changed.
This is very good news indeed—Google are going to allow non-AMP pages to get the same prioritised treatment as AMP pages …if they comply with the kind of performance criteria that Tim outlined.
It’ll take time to get there, but I’m so, so glad to see that Google aren’t going to try to force everyone to use their own proprietary format.
We are taking what we learned from AMP, and are working on web standards that will allow instant loading for non-AMP web content. We hope this work will also unlock AMP-like embeddability that powers Google Search features like the Top Stories carousel.
I just hope that this alternate route to the carousel won’t get lumped under the banner of “AMP”—that term has been pretty much poisoned at this point.
Brad always said that carousels were way to stop people beating each other up in meetings. I like the way Heydon puts it:
Carousels (or ‘content sliders’) are like men. They are not literally all bad — some are even helpful and considerate. But I don’t trust anyone unwilling to acknowledge a glaring pattern of awfulness. Also like men, I appreciate that many of you would rather just avoid dealing with carousels, but often don’t have the choice. Hence this article.
If you have to use a carousel, it doesn’t have to be complicated. Chris runs through some of the options out there. It turns out you can get surprisingly far with CSS alone.
I like this nice straightforward approach. Instead of jumping into the complexities of the final interactive component, Chris starts with the basics and layers on the complexity one step at a time, thereby creating a more robust solution.
If I had one small change to suggest, maybe aria-label might work better than offscreen text for the controls …as documented by Heydon.
This may be the only slideshow on a website I’ve ever actually bothered to click all the way through.
I hate carousels, but if you’re going to have one, this progressively enhanced approach looks pretty good.
Carousels are shit. Auto-animating carousels are really shit. Now proven with science!
I’ve never been a fan of carousels on websites, to put it mildy. It seems I am not alone. And if you doubt the data, ask yourself this: when was the last time you, as a user, interacted with a carousel on any website?
This is something we’ve previously had to build from scratch at Clearleft so it’s nice to see an off-the-shelf solution.