It wasn't missing, it was slow.
Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.
Are you going to re kern and re layout the page when the font arrives? If you want to avoid that then you have to wait.
It makes me angry that this is even a sentence. Call me an old fart but I really felt that the web lost the thread when this became a concern. Websites shouldn't be magazines. Typography and layouts are nice to have, but the first priority should be information and content.
But then the marketing people got involved and it had to become part of the "brand experience". Just give me a HTML table with your menu items, description, and prices. Or even better just the data in an XML file and I can read it without JavaScript and animations and awkward navigation patterns.
<returns to defending his front lawn>
Why though? We’re in 2023 and magazines got out of print to move to the web. Telling literal magazines “no, you shouldn’t exist here” is pretty harsh.
But I’ll grant you the mental image is powerful. I imagine you going to a restaurant and shouting “what’s with the decorum ? And that background music ? and all this space between tables ? this should be a warehouse with everyone sitting on the floor with the lasagna served in tupperwares ”
And even in a traditional magazine the design should never take precedence over the content. (...waiting for the Marshall McLuhan apologist to show up). I mean there is a reason that CSS is not necessary to render HTML or why Progressive Enhancement was a real movement.
This is about what they want to deliver the customer and wether the customer chooses to receive it or not. Some restaurants will not explain you over the phone how much any single dish costs, and they might not want you or me as their customer.
Some won’t have a price for the lobster in the first place, and they’ll tell you how much to pay after you spent the night there. And some absolutely not fancy restaurants won’t even know if there will be lobster the day you go there nor how much they’ll price it.
But in any of these cases, it’s an experience the customer chooses. You can choose to never deal with a place that won’t let you spreadsheet your dinner cost beforehand, or never go to a site that takes more than 1s to fully load, or never allow a site to set a custom font etc.
You’re free to hang up while they go fetch a French accent guy. In the meantime, some other customers already knew the prices but still called just to hear the French accent guy talk to them for 5 minutes and will wait however long to get their fix.
So yes, I’m all for varied and clunky experiences as long as it’s a two way street and no scamming is involved. The web is wide enough to give some small place to all of it.
But at some point I think we need to find a way to bring onboard part of what was left aside, all the stuff were information was not the primary value. Sure not all of it was great, but there should be technical ways to guarantee it’s delivered as fast as it can and as complete as the makers wishes.
I’m imagining a small kid opening the next Lego movie promotion site, and sure they’ll want to know when and where they can watch it, but the first step is to bring them in-universe and persuade them they want to watch the movie in the first place. Bare naked Arial text with no background for 4s won’t help in that respect, could probably be worse than a blank loading page for some kids, so the question really is how to make the actual intended experience work better (how do we solve the font licensing problem? Or how do we make sure to deliver a French Accent menu over the phone without the wait time, to get back to your analogy).
Lets say instead of telling you to hold while they get a person with a french accent on the phone, they only pay people with french accents to answer the phone. There are a little less people with french accents working at the restaurant, but still enough to get the phone answered with only a slight delay compared to a more traditional restaurant phone line. There's also a special 'no fuss' mode on your phone, where you can just chat with the phones default voice assistant. There's no waiting time, and the voice assistant fetches the correct data from the restaurants website and presents it conversationally.
Of course, if all of the people with french accents called in sick for work, the phone might end up unanswered. The problem should be able to be fixed, though, by having some sort of fallback mechanism to people with italian accents.
edit: and it seems we can't make magazines on the web anyway so there's also that.
edit 2: does the background music not loading/working prevents the cook from cooking and the waiter from bringing food ?
> edit 2: does the background music not loading/working prevents the cook from cooking and the waiter from bringing food ?
The cook is busy fixing the Sonos system, your lasagna will have to wait.
Oh but I have been out of that restaurant 5 minutes after I noticed nobody was doing anything related to food. They don't need to microwave the lasagna.
It's entirely reasonable for someone else to value different stuff than you do. If a vendor breaks a things, it's entirely reasonable for the customer to be frustrated by that in every case, no matter the thing.
What you (or I) think of the thing, is entirely beside the point when discussing its breakage, and the fact that people do not seem to get behind this causes too much frustration in the world.