The Evolution of Web Design (2016) | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Web Design (2016)

fabianburghardt.de

107 pointsstelonix27 comments

Hilarious that it doesn’t work on phones. I guess this is only the evolution of web through 2009?

Yep. Mobile is the primary and indeed only way a lot of people access the internet now. Ludicrous that they just flat out reject those users!

Web design/development from the past 5+ years absolutely requires specific, deliberate, and thoughtful support for mobile users.

On a serious note: “Mobile-first” was a rallying cry a few years ago - but all I remember are pages that didn’t work well on desktop, especially pages with above-the-fold (`height: 100vh;`) full-screen graphics or worse: videos. It’s cute on a handheld 480x640 display you can scroll-flick, but terrible at 2560x1440 with a mouse-wheel.

Want another laugh? Turn your phone 90 degrees.

1991: simple and readable, minimizes scrolling, no menu to click through, lightweight

2015: complicated with low-contrast text set against an animated background image, maximises scrolling, requires clicking through a hamburger menu with gratuitous animations, heavyweight

Or, put more simply...

1991: content

2015: content + cruft

1995 has black text on black pen illustration.

2014 has thin gray text on brightened starry sky, which is too faint for my FHD Dell. Indians still buy 800p laptop and desktop screens which are too faint for rooms without curtains.

1997 and 2015 are also painful to read.

Early 2000s with "IE at 1024X768" haven't aged well for high resolution screens.

I will fight to not diverge from stock Bootstrap and landing pages to be upto 3 screens and definitely no scroll hijacking.

Now if I could just get this slider onto every website, and keep it locked at 1993. :)

it's pretty much how I see the web thanks to umatrix

You know what? I prefer the very first one. But then I am strange I admit.

1995 was the first time I used EDIT.EXE to write down a high level graphical thing (HTML) to be interpreted by a program (IE). I felt like god. Prior to that I only made pascal/asm shitty demos..

Prefer the text only version, at least it reflows.

Great job! You nailed the Sci-Fi aesthetic from 2005.

Very cool! For some reason, 2003 is loading blank for me.

Probably because 2003 requires Flash!

With the death of Flash comes the loss of a huge part of internet cultural history, mostly interactive parts - as at least flash cartoons can be rendered to video and put up on YouTube. There were a lot of innovative games and concepts on sites like MiniClip and Newgrounds.

I remember seeing a very early demo of a <canvas>-based SWF player shortly after the iPhone came out - I wonder what would have happened to Flash if Adobe, Apple, or Google put effort into making it work the same way they did with the JavaScript-based PDF renderer.

Same with the death of Java applets. There were a lot of neat educational Java applets, especially in STEM subjects. Some have been recreated in JavaScript, but a lot are gone.

I remember downloading a VR web pages of a cell and atom in 2000s and hoping to get a magazine CD with a VRML player plugin. It may have been 25MB to download, but it took hours of billable phone time. Seems that dream is lost forever.

We could do a lot with 1993 and a modern stylesheet. I hope that's where we'll be in 2023...

ahah loved it, the frontpage two column and background theme really connected with me, having wrote my first website for grandpa in the 97

this made me wonder tho, 2015+ design are all specialized for sparse information and selling something. what would a modern content heavy site focused not on monetizing would look like today (say, a modern wikipedia of sort for timeless pieces)

said site was brought to 2010 levels of design but got stuck there due how the modern template are not suited for such things

I couldn't get past the first heading: "NASA and the Space".

It's a direct translation from the author's (presumably) German native language, where space is indeed referred to as a distincted "das Weltall/der Weltraum" or literally in English, "the space".

It was weird for me, too - NASA, the American space agency, with blatant grammar errors on their front page? Ehhhh...

So the evolution is more about aesthetics than format or anything else!

that was cool

1999’s the best !

I thought you wrote 'The Eurovision of Web Design'

I guess I saw too much TV lately.

It might be cool due

1. See that background rocket video in the 2015? Now "imagine" the video is instead pron1.

2. Don't act like you don't know that scrolling down from pron1 will autoplay pron2 when it enters the viewport.

3. Don't act like you don't know about infinite scroll.

4. Don't act like you don't instinctively know that every single web design in the years before that has fewer prons per minute.

If you fess up to those four truisms and still pine for 90s web, at least have the courage of your convictions to quit computers and become a street preacher already.

... what?

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