We have added another way to follow a story, one that makes it easy to track how a story develops over time. Here is a quote from one of our Senior Producers -
“(Backstory is) a quick way to catch up on how a story has developed over time,” explains CNN.com senior producer Rachel Clarke. “Now, when we want to give history, context and background to a developing story, we go back through our archives to find ‘milestone’ events and then link those together in an interactive window.”
It’s nice to finally see it up. The thing that bugs me a little bit, is that with all of the other elements, layering, and extra processes actually slow it down in some cases and cause graphic artifacts. I had the same issue with the animation of the image gallery, where it caused visible jerks. I haven’t looked into the specifics of the page that are causing it. It is disheartening though that regardless of being optimized from a performance perspective, when it gets thrown in that shell that it effects the experience. Especially given that from a user’s eye they see it as the modules fault and don’t care or know that the shell is the weighted factor.