If you haven't seen it yet, the NY Times' "What is the Higgs?" is a totally rad interactive graphic that explains what the Higgs-Boson particle is. They do it with style and their storytelling ability is top notch so you should check it out. I learned something.

Given that this is a tech blog, I wanted to talk about the technology behind it. Some might think that Flash would be a good candidate for such an application, and yes Flash would work.

If it were 2003, you old timer!

This is the 2013s, man, we use animated .GIFs for our animations!

They simply created a slider effect, similar to the ubiquitous (and mostly useless) carousel effect found on many websites. Each slide has the text (in straight, old-fashioned HTML) and the .GIF, and clicking through the graphic simply advances to the next slide.

Fantastic, and should work on practically every browser known to humankind.

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