Canvases versus Documents | Hacker News Reader

Canvases versus Documents

kaiwenwang.com

86 pointstodsacerdoti21 comments

> Rather than an FAQ section, I wonder if websites will integrate a “LLM question” section instead.

FYI the point of FAQ sections is to "prime" your brain about certain ideas; they're not always questions that they're frequently asked. A blank canvas chat interface won't have the same effect.

> There’s too much slop on website homepages

Some of these homepages have been iterated by many teams of very smart people, and they're sloppy because they convert. That's it. It's not to convey meaning, like a Wikipedia article, but get someone to click "sign up" or "buy."

It's important to distinguish "conveying meaning" with "conveying feeling"

> hacked together with Tailwind + Cursor + shadcn

most YC and other generic (but pretty) landing pages are usually webflow

> FYI the point of FAQ sections is to "prime" your brain about certain ideas; they're not always questions that they're frequently asked.

While a FAQ list can prime the reader to think a certain way, which will hopefully aid their understanding of the site/app/other and how it is intended to work, I think that is a secondary effect.

It isn't questions that they have frequently been asked, but questions that they have seen being asked numerous places elsewhere over time.

Or sometimes the exact question hasn't been explicitly asked, but is a hook from which to hang a clarifying sentence that has been needed in the past and/or they expect might be needed in future. Maybe FUCC (Frequently Uttered Clarifying Comments) would be a better name for that than FAQ.

Sometimes I think it's questions startups wished their (future) customers would frequently ask

I do work in what I call emotional combat and I love this line:

> It's important to distinguish "conveying meaning" with "conveying feeling"

So often I've found myself paying attention to what people say with their words instead of what they're saying with their feelings. The girl who said she felt more uncomfortable with me than anyone else and was gonna block me and I said it's ok if she blocks me if she thinks it'll be best for her and she got more angry.

And I often haven't thought about this on sites either, the ones I've visited or the ones I've built. The text may convey a meaning if people _read_ it, but how do they _feel_ when they see a wall of text?

Thank you for this insight.

> Text is meant to be understood and quickly scanned. Websites are attempting a “canvas-style” design, generally better for conveying feeling, but for text, which is meant to convey meaning and immersion.

This might be, because lots of websites are not there to convey meaning but rather want to bring you in the right mood to do x. And it seems to be that humans - on average - can be far more easily brought into the right mood by manipulating `feelings` than through rational arguments.

I think that's also why some politicians, who shall remain unnamed, are able to speak entire paragraphs of words that don't connect into logical sentences. They'll say all the right words - "great", "success", "prosperity", "safe", and also the other kinds of words "immigrants", "violence", etc, without actually committing to anything specific.

I think the reason it works is the same reason poetry works - the sentences aren't meant to be English prose that can be parsed logically, but instead, meant to be verses that evoke certain emotions.

it seems to work really well for getting elected.

It's like the marketing department won. Who cares if there's a there there, just make everyone think there is.

Of course, the problem comes when you start believing your own marketing/rhetoric.

the best lie you can tell is one that you yourself believe in. I think drinking one's own koolaid is a feature, not a bug.

I'd really like the page to be a canvas, made up of many addressable sub objects such as documents. Doable with rdfa or microdata, where elements can declare urls for themselves, but there's nothing but semantic web researchers and some experimental browsers & extensions for it. The page itself could rock & extend this premise, if it wanted.

Oop, this is me. Thanks for the comments everyone, I've reworked my article to be more coherent.

I'm getting this error

402: PAYMENT_REQUIRED Code: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED

same

A Vercel hostage situation?

https://archive.ph/s2A8Z

https://archive.is/s2A8Z

oop, I got the hacker news hug of death. I'm currently setting up the image CDN now.

While a agree with a few niche points, that some pages don't look good in-between common breakpoints, and that sometimes typography can miss the mark in terms of legibility, I completely disagree with the idea that "canvas" style designs are bad. Look at the graphic design of any modern magazine, very often it looks more like the "canvas" design than the "document". Also, landing pages have nearly infinite real estate, and they are there to communicate as much information as possible, because it might be the only page the user ever sees.

This dichotomy seems like a very useful tool for analyzing media.

Is the article a canvas or a document?

Nototo, a now dismissed web app, really nailed this. I'm gonna miss it so much.

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