The site stopped animating at you

Every block on this site faded up as you scrolled to it. Headings broke into lines and rose out of masks, figures counted from zero, the product shot tilted as the page moved, and film played behind the last thing the page said. Three libraries were loaded to do it: about a hundred and ninety kilobytes of JavaScript, and a two and a half megabyte video on top.

It is gone. The first screen still arrives, because that is the one moment a reader is actually watching, and it is nine lines of CSS now rather than a timeline in a library. Everything below it is simply on the page when you get there.

Two things still move, and both of them move for a reason rather than at you. The first screen, and the band of words across the middle of the home page (that list is longer than the screen, and the drift is how you get to read the end of it). Its loop used to jump twenty-three pixels every thirty-eight seconds, because the track slid half its own width and half its own width was one copy of the list plus half a gap. The spacing belongs to each word now, so half the track is exactly one copy and the seam is gone. Hover it and it stops, so you can read one.

The home page lists where the software is used, and under the countries it showed fourteen Indian states. They were the first fourteen of a list held in GST state-code order, which is the order the tax system numbers states in, and has nothing to do with where anybody trades. So the page offered Sikkim, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh, and did not mention Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu or Gujarat at all.

There is no honest way to pick a top fourteen, so there is no top fourteen: all thirty-three states and union territories are listed, alphabetically, and each still has its own page. The GST code that used to sit in front of every name has gone with them: “02 Himachal Pradesh, 03 Punjab” reads as a numbered list that has lost its first item, and the code belongs on the state’s own page where there is room to say what it is.