The Illusion of Control in Web Design (2018)

alistapart.com

19 points·zeveb··8 comments

That fiasco with "parental controls" blacklists reminds me of when I was doing admissions for one of UKs universities and suddenly we stopped getting any new applications.

School leavers are encouraged to search for universities online, using their school's computer facilities. However, the schools also have "duty of parental care", which includes some pretty severe censorship.

It just so happens that certain universities, whole counties in fact, e.g. Sussex, Essex, have the dreaded "SEX" in their names and so were filtered out.

It wasn't necessarily the Scunthorpe problem.

“British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the opera, Radio Three, the countryside, the law, the universities… both of them.” - Sir Humphrey Appleby

For someone who is not British, wouldyou mind explaining who/what the both are?

Oxford and Cambridge. (At a stretch, one might also include St. Andrews and Trinity.)

Is the page actually supposed to have the top half of the title cut off? Is it too cool for me? Or just a CSS fail?

Definitely intentional. Design is subjective, I like it.

A List Apart has been doing this stylistically for a while.

"Please don't complain about website formatting [...] and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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