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Comment by felixmar | Hacker News Reader

One thing that surprised me after using an iPad for a while is that the web is starting to feel old. I now see bloated web pages everywhere. Unnecessary widgets, links, icons, useless side columns, actual content making up a quarter of the screen. Information overload. I am now regularly imagining how a site i visit would be better as an iPad app. Applications like Flipboard have created new expectations how content could be consumed.

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I have also feel that the web has become bloated and overloaded. I don't see what this has to do with the iPad. What I would like to see is a revival of the web with structural markup, fluid layouts and a minimum of distractions.

Is there anything about what you need to do which can only be done on an iPad? Such a revival is easier on a new platform where you don't know what to expect yet. However, I don't see anything which would prevent someone bold enough from cleaning up their part of the web.

No, but the recent spate of apps that take user experience when accessing third party content very seriously shows how utterly painful most of the normal web is. I think with first-party content providers it's also that if they're getting paid, they at the very least cut the ads down from eye-gouge to simply irritating, which helps as well.

I think maybe the point is that while there's nothing technically special about the platform, at the high end its developers are in a league of their own when it comes to UI. This is of course a distilled version of the entire Apple developer culture, which has always taken this stuff more seriously than Windows and certainly *nix.

A lot of websites are outdated and built with 2001 in mind, no doubt.

But please don't turn the web into a console game.

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