Thanks for finding this. I would've posted that if I had known about, since I think most HN readers (like me) dislike interaction-heavy stories that can go screwy on various computer/browser setups. I know the NatGeo front page has links to both versions (technically, they are entirely separate stories, with different content/angles), but maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see a link to the text version in the multimedia piece, and vice-versa. Or if the crosslinks do exist, they aren't prominent at all. That's a huge oversight, I hope it's not because of some internal office politics -- e.g. the multimedia team not wanting readers to bounce to the text version, and the print team not wanting to lose readers to the multimedia version.
It's still a crappy version - since when do browsers need javascript in order to display images?
I know that it is off-topic, and the topic of the article is much more serious than web technology, but I feel it is always worth pointing out that if a high-profile website like www.nationalgeographic.com can't provide elementary functionality without javascript, what hope is there for the smaller websites?
In this case, though, I am glad the images are not shown, the text description was gruesome enough.
I'm generally averse to JS-heavy presentations but I wouldn't consider this "crappy" -- in fact, I think this might be the best usecase/justification of such a format that I've yet seen, and this includes the NYT's Pulitzer-winning Snow Fall [0].
The JS in the NatGeo story is used for certain important and dramatic effects, such as the transition from a full page photo of the patient's original face, to the x-ray after her suicide attempt, to what her face looked like after the 22 reconstruction surgeries. The JS allows for as graceful a transition as possible while forcing the user to see the entirety of each of the faces. Scrolling through the photos with a standard vertical scroll would not have the same effect. Nor would a static layout of the 3 photos side by side (since they'd have to be drastically scaled down in size).
As you said, the subject matter is gruesome. The photos are best seen each all at once, as they would on a magazine print page. The JS for the feature works as a pretty good digital replacement for a physical page turn, IMO.
