Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The fact that it HAS been 20 years and browsers "haven't bothered" to "fix" this only goes to show how unimportant this really is.

I couldn't disagree more. Browsers and modern web development style keep kicking out tried and tested technologies in favour of newer alternatives that are objectively inferior. This is not a good thing if you're interested in an attractive, functional WWW.

In this case we stopped using real images prepared by real graphic designers and digital artists using real graphics software and we substituted rounded corners and gradients and web fonts and scalable line art graphics. You can argue about whether this has advantages by reducing data sizes or cutting costs through allowing developers with bland toolkits based on "flat design" to do styling work instead of hiring experts. What you can't seriously dispute is that those new techniques render really badly in some or all of the major browsers and now many sites look bad unnecessarily and some become harder to use as well.

Oh I get the crusade, it's a noble one. I even support it. But you're conflating your "important to me" definition with my "actually important out in the real world". Browser vendors haven't bothered to "fix" this for a fifth of a century. Which makes this the definition of an ivory tower "problem". If it moved the needle in the real world even a little, it would have been changed long ago. And maybe it will one day, we live in hope.

But the airquotes around "fix" are precisely because it's not "broken", it's simply "how it's implemented". Plan accordingly.

> ...we stopped using real images prepared by real graphic designers ...allowing developers with bland toolkits based on "flat design" to do styling work instead of hiring experts.

Yeah that's a separate issue and rings of No True Scotsman-ism.

> What you can't seriously dispute is that those new techniques render really badly in some or all of the major browsers and now many sites look bad unnecessarily and some become harder to use as well.

Pretty sure that is disputable. "Many sites" do look bad, but if you're claiming this is because of browser sRGB colour handling then you're gonna have to cite a source or do more than claim the high ground.

But the airquotes around "fix" are precisely because it's not "broken", it's simply "how it's implemented". Plan accordingly.

I do. When I'm building web stuff professionally, there's a laundry list of CSS features (often quite basic ones) that it would be very convenient to use but I often don't because I know they will look terrible in production for a significant proportion of users. But that's unfortunate.

Yeah that's a separate issue and rings of No True Scotsman-ism.

Separate perhaps but I don't see how Now True Scotsman applies here. There certainly are professional developers who also have significant knowledge of things like colour theory and graphic design. You're talking to one. But those are separate skill sets, not normally required or expected for most development work. I don't think it's plausibly deniable that web development today frequently relies on someone who designed some toolkit, probably using basic CSS effects for almost all the visuals, instead of hiring an in-house designer. And I don't think it's plausibly deniable that today's WWW is much more homogenous and dare I say boring in appearance than the WWW of 10 or 20 years ago. There are usability advantages that come from some types of consistency but does everything really have to be so same-y?

"Many sites" do look bad, but if you're claiming this is because of browser sRGB colour handling then you're gonna have to cite a source or do more than claim the high ground.

It's not just the sRGB handling. I'm talking about a bigger picture. Some popular browsers had antialiasing glitches that made rounded corners done with CSS look like low-res pixellated junk for years when `border-radius` was first a thing. Try applying CSS transforms to anything using fonts or SVGs today and you can still see horrendous rendering artifacts in some browsers, and even worse if you're animating as well. Of course the fonts themselves render completely differently on different platforms even without any transforms applied and sometimes that has a material effect on important aspects like accessibility or even basic legibility. Gradients over large areas have horrible banding in some browsers because they don't use basic dithering techniques that every real graphics program has used since about the 1980s. The list of browser rendering glitches that any halfway decent creative software has avoided for a very long time is long and frustrating to read.

I don't really disagree with you, I think we're just on different sides of what it means for this to be "important".

> but I don't see how Now True Scotsman applies here.

"Real" designers, using "real" software, hiring "experts", etc. Because "no true designer would X...". There is absolutely genuine expertise in this domain but, much like development, it isn't a profession. It's not even a trade. Anyone who says they're a designer (or developer), is. For better and (usually) worse.

I guess color theory hasn't been given much love in web development because it's hard and murky. Once you do a dive into it, you realize there's no correct answers, only tradeoffs. It's a lot harder to be zealous about some color model being the ultimate color model because you'll encounter reality soon enough.

I suppose the original author is a zealot for linear SRGB, but that might change once he encounters a black and white gradient interpolated in linear.

In design work there is rarely a single right answer but there are often a lot of obviously wrong answers. Unfortunately web browsers seem to have latched onto those for many of these features, hence the awful gradients, janky animations, glitchy font rendering, etc.

I would guess it has not been given much thought, as the initial comment suggests, is most developers and users don't care at all. The most used web sites look terrible but people are using them for function, like searching, shopping and paying their bills.

The frustrating thing is that users do care, at least up to a point. There have been success stories in the modern era where a well-designed, well-executed product has dethroned a long-standing incumbent (or at least provided credible competition despite being David against Goliath) and the slick presentation seems likely to have been a competitive advantage. There's no shortage of complaints about sites or apps with poor design either.

However we know that most users will prioritise other aspects, such as functionality or security, over aesthetics. If the advantages of a nice design are purely cosmetic and don't also improve factors like the usability of an app or the credibility of a marketing site then that's probably going to be less important than missing some key feature the user wants or lacking the network effects that existing products in the market have established or convincing a potential customer that you're trustworthy before they had over their card details.

What do you think an example of a site where a new player has come along with a much better looking site than the incumbent and beat them?

Not trying to be negative, I just can't think of any and that would be excellent evidence that it does matter. Just bringing up a list of the top 200 web sites and they are the reference gallery of visually terrible sites.

The first example that comes to mind is banking. In my country (UK) there seems to be a clear gap now between the old school "high street banks" that have been around forever and a new group that have entered the market more recently.

Both types of bank offer similar basic accounts and services. Interest rates and fees also tend to be similar at the moment.

What does separate them is that the established "big names" almost universally have terrible online banking and mobile apps while the newer alternatives tend to focus on these facilities (I think some of them don't even have physical branches) and they have slick, modern UIs aimed squarely at younger generations and the digital native market.

I don't have any hard data to cite but the number of younger people I see using these services suggests they are having some significant success at breaking into even such a heavily regulated and competitive market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com