W3C Beta Website

I don't know, if there's ever a website that I want to be boring and readable, it's the W3C. I do not want an exciting or unique W3C site. I want it to be organized and designed to be as readable and easily navigable as possible. I do not want to guess how to use a menu or search for links. I want it to work like that thousands of other boring sites I've used before, because when I'm at the W3C, I'm not there to be inspired, I'm there to get some specific information. I don't want any nonsense between me and the spec I'm looking for.

I disagree, I think a degree of homogenization is good for information heavy websites, like government ones [1][2][3] and sites geared towards documentation. Consistency here is good because it makes things familiar and therefore means people spend less time trying to figure things out/find what they're looking for. Creativity isn't necessarily the point with sites like these. Now if you're marketing a product or showcasing something on the creative side, that's a different situation entirely and in that case I agree with you. The Bootstrap wave 10 years ago was indeed excessive.

[1] https://18f.gsa.gov/

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/project-gigabit-...

[3] https://www.healthcare.gov/

I think certain fads are a little dreadful in terms of unoriginality - those humaaans illustrations, for example. But I think most of the web really should look similar. I think of brochure websites like resumes: you're trying to depict key points without distractions and obstacles. Just like that one person's "unique" resume is actually the last one you want to read, so is that unnecessarily "original" website.

The insight with "every fucking bootstrap site" wasn't about sites having similar looks, it was about sites haplessly repeating the same design-forward look and feel.

Bootstrap invited sites to use huge full-bleed stock photos, carousels, colorful buttons, large icons, slide out menus, etc when none of that fancy design language actually resonated with the function of the site.

The desire wasn't to mock boring sites into hiring rockstar designers to make their designs even more unique and fashionable. It was for boring sites to lay off on the cheap whoopy doo design (because design-forward content is tiring when too familiar) and just present themselves clearly and without all the shitty pizazz.

This site does have that problem, but its remedy is basically the opposite of what you seem to be suggesting.

I agree with you... except this IS the W3C, and the whole point is they set standards for websites. If they looked nothing like every other site, that'd actually be a bigger problem.

I'd know those FontAwesome icons on https://beta.w3.org/developers/ anywhere.

Honestly though consistency is probably preferred here. I see top nav, a hamburger icon, a breadcrumb title bar and a search button, I have confidence in my expectations for how those will behave. With a documentation site, the ability to navigate and find what you need takes precedence over being 'delighted' by some landing page.

Actually in this case they broke my expectation by having the search just redirect to duckduckgo with a site parameter.

The Memphis seems like a decently modern take as well with the gradients thrown in.

I disagree with this specifically for the W3C on everything _except_ the illustration on the front, which I have dubbed "big pants people." That's an unnecessarily homogenous design trend, but everything else is homogenous for the purposes of readability and accessibility, which is very inline with the W3C.

To be fair, I'm not sure you want a ton of uniqueness when it comes to documentation, I just want to be able to find what I'm looking for. For example, IBM and ESRI have what I would consider to be terrible documentation because of their unique take on structure.

Oh I love that site! Very appropriate demonstration for what is possible and what is not preferable. I agree that distinctive designs are far better. For the W3C I think they could best serve to have multiple versions of their website to best demonstrate the variety of websites that would occur-- information/static, production/dynamic, non-production/update-able-- since they have reputation as the web standards body.

It kind of depends on what your app is/does. It would be kind of hypocritical that we all settled on the same form factors for mobile devices, but we want the apps that we use on them to all be radically different looking or "artistic".

Most modern UI kits look and feel the same because we have figured out what works and what doesn't.

"why bother having a time of designers" -- on an individual basic application level, definitely. Just get a reasonable UI kit and save the money.

Do you have have any good examples of useful and visually interesting websites?

bikeshedding isn't helpful.

its called having intuitive ux. dont make users think. user settings and notifications go in the top right, logo and home page link in the top left. if you dont do this, you've screwed yourself in a way you may or may not ever quantify.

i agree it can get boring to see bootstrap everywhere, i also agree with "why bother having designers". but at the end of the day, i want my users productive and not thinking.

For me the UK design system page was half cookie banner, half “get started” pop up (which afaict just lets you through to the page you’re already on when you tap it. What’s the point?)

Hardly inspires confidence in this site as a shining example of simplicity and design…

Only criticism i have is i ended up on a search form and after submitting to it the page reloaded and the results were below the fold. Otherwise yep, very fast and clean.

For people who don’t know, Corporate Memphis (aka Alegria, Homoglobo) is a style of illustrations that features extrahuman attributes, such as non proportional bodies and non-existing skin colors. It has been credited to Facebook, and was explicitly made to be modular (as in designers are replaceable).

Obviously beauty is subjective, but to me this style has strong connotations of cynical corporations, eerie feelings of minimalist facelessness, toxic positivity and an anxious alignment with current political winds, clear enough to minimize scrutiny but vague enough to be entirely unactionable. The mood words are growth hacking and user engagement.

...are we looking at the same image? https://cdn.w3.org/cms-uploads/Hero-illustrations/groups.svg ? I don't think that's "Corporate Memphis". A distant relative at best, but it's main similarity is being a little bit abstracted. I kind of like it, actually, as iconified people go.

Not only that, there's also the Islamic/Hadith ban of depicting any person, making this a particular bad idea (if the reduction to role models in a corporate memphis style graphic isn't dehumanizing enough in itself).

Yes please! There's no point in having the image/illustration too. Yes it would be dead/white space but thats not an issue at all

I like when softwares have quirky logos / graphics with personality, like Linux, Plan9, openbsd, there's a bunch more but can't think of them on the top of my head

May be a facet of the page they have no control over and is a bit besides the point

Why? What's your goal visiting the W3C homepage?

It should be to learn who they are and what else the website provides. You're not there to read it's entire homepage. You're there to navigate.

The pages that need to be dense, like the standards document, are.

+1, the deemphasis/degrading of average information density has been disappointing as user. Old site should be kept and used as their ideal demonstration for information-dense websites.

I’m bringing info density back like its the 1700’s. https://Scroll.pub

You can always press “cmd minus” to bring the old web back. Every press brings you back by a decade

Truth be told, there is no reason to believe that what is popular in web design is particularly good for accessibility or the sensibilities of people. In fact, I'd argue "Corporate Memphis" in particular is something that became overused in spite of the fact that it offended sensibilities for many.

That said, I think over-applying the "accessibility" viewpoint to bleed into things that really don't have to do with accessibility is an anti-pattern. I do not feel like KDE is less "accessible" due to the artwork and character mascots of Tyson Tan, even though it may not appeal to everyone's sensibilities. At the end of the day, I'd argue in favor of unique and memorable designs that feel like they have some personality rather than like something a committee carefully constructed to be as inoffensive as they could imagine.

I agree, it looks good! On mobile in particular, it looks refreshingly good and feels very functional.

It's using Craft CMS as the CMS, though that doesn't imply a specific set of front-end technologies or build processes (Craft can use the Twig templating language, or be headless and power a static site generator).

At the end of the day using Bootstrap and Jquery is no different from using HTML, CSS and ES6 JS. They are just tools and anything you build with them can be replicated using other means.

After seeing the dumpster fire that was the Warcraft 3 remaster, and the awfully executed heel-face turn in World of Warcraft's most recent writing, do you really want to see Blizzard make a Warcraft 4?

all it has is jquery3 + bootstrap4, still amazing.

Yeah, I love it. It works and looks perfect in my browser with JS disabled and no web components or even css grid support.

All the html and text really are in the page and not just requested later by some javascript application being executed. It's refreshing and looks a hell of a lot better than any JS sites do in my browser.

There is only one error

> Error: An img element which has an alt attribute whose value is the empty string must not have a role attribute.

The rest are info or warnings.

Works fine here