The transition kept flashing

There was a transition. The old page still flashed in front of the new one.

I spent an afternoon wiring the changeover. Fades ran. Titles swapped. Every trip from the list into a piece left a smear, like two frames that had not registered. Small enough to ignore. Small enough that if I had been more tired I might have shipped the smear.

The order was the whole trick. The browser photographs now, waits for you to say the new page has arrived, photographs again, and dissolves the pair. When I said “go,” the address may already have moved. The screen was still the previous essay. The second photograph was a copy of the first. Two identical frames fading through each other read as a flash with no cause.

The fix is almost rude. You only get to say “the new one is here” after the new page has sat down. The go-ahead can leave early. Sitting down is a second event. The gap between them is where the flash lives.

I gave it a short time to quit. Slow nets, heavy pages — a transition can freeze in midair. Better to drop the new page in place than leave someone staring at a pane of old light. Modifier-click for a new tab, a click on the page you are already on, a system asking for less motion: the animation steps aside. Those exits matter. Politeness should know when to shut up.

Language switching later used the same latch. The path looks unchanged; only the words swap. If you forget to count language when you settle the promise, the veil waits for a page change that never comes, then times out. That failure is uglier: the reader is already on the other side, and the animation still thinks nobody has moved.

What I kept is narrow. Leaving and arriving are two times. Treat them as one and the screen will spend a frame reminding you. That frame is easy to file under “a bit of motion.” I am less willing to file it there now.