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Nowadays, more and more websites are moving towards replacing the text links with icons. And some of these icons are so simple and abstract that sometimes it is hard to tell what they even mean! For example, the default GMail web interface once had simple text buttons with options like "Archive", "Report Spam", "Delete", etc. Now it has tiny icons instead. While the bin icon is probably obvious to everyone (if not, it means "Delete"), there is an icon with a tiny down arrow in a tiny box that I would normally guess means "Download" but turns out it is "Archive" instead. There is another icon with a tiny right arrow in a tiny box. I would normally guess that means "Forward" but turns out it is "Move to". (Move to what? Move to a label!)
GitHub too recently adopted this trend. It had very clear and obvious text navigation links earlier. Now we find little icons instead. One of them is an irregular but symmetrical hexagon with three line segments within it. Can you guess what it is? Turns out it is a badly drawn envelope that means "Notifications". There is another one with a little dot in a circle. Until I hovered over it to read its tooltip, I had no idea that it means "Issues"!
I blame Steve Jobs. "It's intuitive!" my foot.
Even the idea that it's for screen economy on mobile devices doesn't make sense, because if these things are links, they either bring you somewhere else, or they expand something on your screen, presumably, over other content, or displacing other content. NO reason not to just have text that says "Menu" or "Settings."
Every instance of text needs to be dynamic. You can't just write "Text", you need to write "$text" (a variable) and have code that refers to a file containing that word in a given language to replace the variable with. It's tons of upkeep work, and you can never cover every single language known to man.
An icon on the other hand? "icon.svg". Done.
Ironically, in an effort to be global and inclusive we are throwing out all the languages and attempting to replace them with a single, universal iconography.
I fucking hate this trend, but I can understand and respect why it happens. People are fucking lazy and this is the course of least resistance overall.
“The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned.” -- Bruce Ediger¹
And for accessibility reasons the text should still be there in some form² so the icon is just pushing the problem elsewhere, though admittedly accessibility is often forgotten (or actively neglected) making this a moot point.
--
[0] i.e. before the meaning of a particular icon in this context is explained
[1] usually attributed to Bruce Ediger, though there is apparently some room for disagreement on that
[2] as a tooltip, which additionally helps those without extra accessibility needs because it shows on-hover³ for them
[3] or long-press on mobile UAs, where hover events are not present
Meanwhile, there is also the opposite trend to enhance languages[0], supposedly also to make them more inclusive. There, too, the "UX" suffers, though for different reasons (readability, additional grammatical complexity, …).
To follow your line of thought, now I'm imagining a world where, in the interest of both gender neutrality and UX, in our languages we start replacing words with icons. :eek.jpg:
[0]:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languag...
The text still needs to appear as tooltip. So the problem has just moved elsewhere.
Just have both then? Text and Icon. Text in either the available localization, or in english if it's not there. KISS.
Which would be tolerable if those icons actually made it clear what their function is. But, increasingly, they don't even try.
;)
These types tend to hate "ugly" things like text over "pretty" things like icons. And minimalism above all else.
It's a weird idea that Apple Products are somehow the antithesis of the Military, but as a metaphor it does raise some interesting points.
<font size="2">
<a href="dmg_base.htm">
<img src="dmgbase.gif" border="0">
</a>
<br>
Game Boy
</font>Indeed. Not just websites, either. A similar trend has taken hold in applications, and it's awful.
I'd happily trade the video ads of today for the HTML <blink> tag of old without any hesitation.
HN has a good layout - there are some (quite small) margins but it otherwise uses most of your screen. More websites should follow this pattern, IMO.
Requiring the user to resize the window is not a great alternative, IMO. It feels cumbersome, and people with many tabs will hate it. And doesn't work on mobile devices.
Will link or write another reply if I can succeed. I have no time to look at it right away.
If long line length was common then browsers would have a similar feature built-in.
I wouldn't be so sure. It was common for a long time (and still is on older sites) and browsers never got that feature. They also haven't bothered with a dark/light mode switch even though that is a much simpler feature since the setting is already there.
I prefer that be left to me to size the column for my reading preference, by setting browser size accordingly, though I appreciate a great many users browse full-screen at all times and designers need to account for that lest they be blamed for the users choices.
> Unfortunately there is no setting to communicate text width preference
Many sites have an explicit dark/light mode toggle, either instead of or as well as respecting prefers-color-scheme. Perhaps a “constrain width” toggle could similarly be implemented.
Yes, this is also horrible.
So it is not worth wasting your 28.8 modem power for it.
The traffic might be low for some/most of them, but then the interactions with people who found me through them are so much more interesting and meaningful
We need to be efficient, please. Who cares if everyone is using it. Faster we tick all the boxes, the better. So we can get a new sheet of unticked todo list. /s.
It looks to me like what would happen if you tried to verbally describe some kind of fan-based web site from 1996 to someone else who hadn't experienced the web pre-Web 2.0, and then they went off and did their best with it.
I will say, I did enjoy the web a lot more back when it felt more like a carnival than a shopping mall.
PS: https doesn't work on Dillo for this web site, but thanks for not enforcing a http->https redirect!
I have had this saved as a bookmark for a few years now: https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
There is just so much there that it's fun to come back to every now and then to poke around and see what you find.