This is a web page
justinjackson.ca
justinjackson.ca
I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and anyone could do that. It was like watching a Pachinko machine pay out a jackpot :-)
[1] It was circa Christmas 1994 since I was trying to explain to them what Java was and why I thought it might have an impact on the world.
[1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)
The mother of all link directories started from NCSA who distributed the first web browser (Mosaic) and they ran a site where they would publish a monthly list of "What's New" on the web. They pulled the pages from their site a few years ago but fortunately I made a mirror on my server for historical reference that you can check out here:
http://www.kitchencloset.com/realstuff/ncsa/whats_new-archiv...
Enjoy!
edit: forgot to mention web rings someone else just mentioned.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geociti...
By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics.
I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.
I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names.
Different times.
When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley.
I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."
The technology changes but we seem to keep reinventing the wheel every time the cart gets overcrowded.
Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness.
It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
Not necessarily. The holy grail is growth where culture is preserved, i.e. the rate of acquisition of new users is below the point where they overwhelm the culture.
New users acculturate over time and exposure, so you can roughly model it as "at any time, no more than x% of the users should be 'new'".
That's still exponential growth, so it needn't be elitest. In time, you'll still get to everyone who wants in.
Making it work tho, that's the rub :-)
The future people will have fun comparing and contrasting different reputation systems and online communities. Assuming enough information stays for them to study.
Usenet was archived by Deja, which got bought by Google. It's in a sorry state, but at least it's stil there.
Who's archiving Reddit, or HN, or 4chan, or all the rest?
I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.
The internet contributed to building support for the Arab Spring throughout the world but it was tyrannical regimes that were the root cause. Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism', a profession in which people would put their live's on the line to reveal scandals and uncover secrets they felt the world should have known.
Technology does not motivate moral growth. People motivate moral growth. Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world when they invaded Poland and set the course for World War II.
The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
We still do. And, historically, it never got us anything as important as cablegate.
> Technology does not motivate moral growth.
Technology enables moral growth by reducing the amount of morality-crushing cruelty we're exposed to on a daily basis and allowing our natural morality to flourish. It's easier to care about others when you haven't just lost your child to smallpox.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
> Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world
They were, at best, on a par with the rest of the Western World, and, frankly, mismanaging themselves into defeat due to the very nature of their society.
The idolization of the Nazis as being so efficient and so advanced is due to what some Western observers thought before the war, when Hitler was using basic Keynesian-style pump-priming in the form of military spending to get the country out of the Depression, mixed with a few largely worthless wonder-weapons, such as the V2 rockets and the early jets, which did nothing to win the war.
> The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
This is true but it misses my point: Everyone can have their little niche space, which is amazing if you're not an upper-middle-class heterosexual cissexual white male who would have niche spaces anyway.
Gays can have spaces where being gay isn't weird. Trans people can have spaces where being trans doesn't mean you get your head kicked in. That kind of social interaction was pretty well impossible before the Internet, especially in places like Iran or Alabama, where advertising that you are 'a certain way' could be an invitation to violence.
The Internet is both a network of linked networks and a community of linked communities; both aspects are vital to what it is and what it can become.
I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).
Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.
The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic.
Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...
Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another.
What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.
There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two".
Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time.
Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :)
[1]: http://i.imgur.com/HxDWs9c.jpg [2]: http://amzn.com/1568843003
While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet.
As often as not, something would happen.
To me, the web is just the next step in the improvement in the publishing of the written word. I don't see it as different than a book.
I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and many people could do that. It was like looking into the darkness and suddenly seeing a firefly blinking :-)
...
My point here is, the printing press had it's impact, nobody denies that. Seeing the times changing is what leaved ChuckMcM's in-laws astounded.
Edit: OMG it's still alive..
Then I found Google, and I never used anything else again.
Every single time, google was the first back. It wasn't always ranked the top result back then, but it was fast.
It's not hard to see why everyone switched to it.
I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"?
That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars.
If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster" than using Altavista. Gawd, I musta been and early hipster, how much more "hipster" can you get than that.
the FAST Search guys sold alltheweb.com to yahoo.com and focused on enterprise search (i.e. they sell/license their software to companies) with customers such as newspaper companies, yellow pages companies and government agencies. They were then acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and rolled into their Sharepoint offerings.
No.
The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low key graphics, subtle interactivity, and so on. It's absurd to argue that such a rich medium should always be focused on words.
Text does not have to be the focus. It depends on what the purpose to be achieved is.
This for example: "But the most powerful tool on the web is still words."
That blatantly is not the case in my opinion. Photos are vastly more powerful than words on today's web. That's why 3/4 of all the posts on Reddit's home page are links to imgur. That's why a gazillion photos are uploaded to and shared on Facebook every day.
That's why you can read about protests in Brazil all day long, and until you see the photos, the sheer power of the protest will not ring anywhere near as loudly. This has been true so long as photography has existed. Whether we're talking about the Holocaust and WW2, an atomic bomb going off, or a photo of a kitten or puppy, you name it and photos win 9 times out of 10 over words.
What would walking on the moon be like without photos (and video) to go with it? Would reading the transcripts have amazed the world like the imagery did? I say not even remotely. Imagine reading about a man standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, versus seeing it.
Another side note to all of this: there are almost a billion illiterate people still, sadly. And another billion that are only partially literate. Nearly every one of them can understand imagery. Imagery also crosses languages, you don't have to understand Mandarin to grasp the Tiananmen Square protest.
Words are used simply here to better communicate his point.
Nowhere did he say that words are more important than photos or video.
You say "No" to him, but yet you know he would not disagree with what you have said regarding photos and video. I find the whole response to his original post borderline strawman.
I would argue the evidence for focus on "words" is overwhelming, and that you're attempting to change the meaning of the piece.
The author did say this however:
"At it's heart, web design should be about words. Words don't come after the design is done. Words are the beginning, the core, the focus."
The title is "Words"
The author uses "writing" and "reading" and "words" over and over again.
The word "content" isn't used once, nor anything like it (except as a negative, against content management systems).
And the author says:
"If you're a web designer, or a client who is working with one, I'd like to challenge you to think about words first. Instead of starting with a style guide or a Photoshop mockup, start with words on a page."
Again, the author is intentionally guiding toward a very precise thing: words. There is no confusion on the focus, it's blatant.
Beyond that, though, while images and movies are highly effective, if very expensive, ways of influencing people's feelings, they work just as well in the service of falsehood as in the service of truth. As such, they primarily work to amplify the influence of the powerful. Language allows you to share your thoughts instead of your feelings, and text in particular provides a much better way to gradually explore our way toward the truth. With language and text, mere power stands helpless before reason.
They still have titles. And many of those posts are memes that have words in them.
My point was that the most powerful tool on the web is still words.
Here's why:
1. Words are an excellent starting point. All you need is a text editor. Words are a great way to express ideas in a concrete way. Words can stand on their own.
2. It's easy to add things to words. Adding an image, video, or other media to words has the power to further strengthen the message. Side note: there's also the (negative) potential for adding too much, or for muddling the message.
3. Text on the web is small. My page was 4KB. Most people around the world, even with a bad connection, would be able to view that page.
You're right: images can be powerful. But on the web, I think text still rules.
(I notice you responded to this thread with words, and not an image or a video)
The parent mentions the some large percentage of the links are to imgur, which is absolutely true. However, the actual content of those images is so shallow they could each be summed up in a sentence apiece; ironically enough, looking at the front page this very instant, half of the images contain words to convey a specific message, and the rest rely on the title of the post to convey context to the image.
The right picture may be worth a thousand words, but much to my dismay there are very few pictures of that quality to be found.
Horrendous on the eye but gives everything you need. And more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5906202
Words have much better chance of survival than other elements of web design. What was considered a decent design 10+ years ago, is today often laughable.
I would just remark that photos and video have the same survival aspect to them that text does. Particularly as our present and future is clearly one stored digitally. It's all bytes.
I would also point out for fun, that duration of survival doesn't inherently equate to greater value or beauty. There are some ugly and boring things that last a very long time (rocks vs flowers; I think I can say that people tend to think certain flowers (roses) are inherently more beautiful than your average gray rock).
The trend of today is sticky headers. Tomorrow it will look rediculuous. Is it tech? No. It's the matter of fashion.
It's interesting to wonder what the next-common "wide area" communication mode is -- photos are widely shared, but is there a lot truly communicated with them? I guess it depends on whether you think those picture's typically say more than a thousand words. Videos, too. They serve as a topic of discussion amongst peers, not as a mode of discussion themselves.
In fact the deeper point remains even if I conceded your argument: there are always those who excel in the creation of art and in presentation, regardless of medium. What makes the Internet different is that it facilitates peer to peer communication, that quality powered for the most part by the universality of written text. I guess that's why it if often compared to the invention of the printing press, another time such a fundamental shift in human communication took place (facilitating many to everyone, but not everyone to everyone).
Those who excel in arts and communication -- and, to an unusual degree! engineering -- are still the magic wizards/grey eminences of the medium, prominently shaping something that wouldn't exist without them.
[0] Words, typed out: A manner that's arguably truly more efficient and useful than what it's originated to represent, speech. Imagine consuming all the text content you read everyday on the web (such as this!) delivered by speech.
[1] Leaving out the fact, that of course, not everyone has the ability to participate in words, typed out. While I do think it has served to interconnect everyone in terms of exchanging thoughts, it also serves as a means of separation between those who can and those who can't: lacking access or straight up capability to use this mode.
Edit: added some more thoughts.
More people can digest a photo than can read a specific language, by a radical margin.
Please refrain from this sort of ad hominem response, it adds nothing to conversation.
But the vast majority of pictures and movies aren't the My Lai photographs or the moon landing. Most pictures and movies just don't communicate a whole lot of thought, it's amazing when they do, which is why photography and movie-making and music are such arts! That's because the vast majority of everyone doesn't have the capability, opportunity or sheer (in fail videos: bad) luck to take a picture or a movie like that.
In other words, visual arts might be a more universally accessible when it comes to receiving side, but they are much less universally accessible when it comes to the producing side.
Obviously false, or else answer me in Cherokee, Tamil, Hindi, and Latin.
Images can be understood beyond the bounds of a single language.
Images can be understood beyond the bounds of a single language, but only for the very simplest of concepts. Go more complex than a sentence or so, and interpretations begins to muddy the waters in ways that language simply does not.
Notice that the page is automatically responsive, and is perfectly usable on a phone, tablet, or anything else.
If your page has no CSS styles it will be perfectly responsive. If it's not, you've messed up that nice feature of the web with your stylesheet. Now you probably think you need to learn about media queries to make it work again.
I have occasionally seen beautiful video on the web. I have much more frequently seen video whose author had deluded himself into thinking it was beautiful.
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2013-June/00... talks some about the relative usefulness of different kinds of digital media.
I have become profoundly convinced over the last 15 years that words (& to an extent, text), is the generally best mode of communication of meaning, beating out things such as video, images, smells, etc. But I've been generally unable to articulate that idea cleanly and persuasively.
What about music, sounds?
[1] As I suspect most people spending much time on this site do as they aren't here for the pictures.
[2] Actually video editing software does give mechanisms for rapidly scanning the video so perhaps it is possible but not offered in web video software that I have seen.
I have some sympathy for your point, but I don't think the argument about video is valid. 99% of the web is crap. Always has been. Probably always will be. The crap includes text, video, etc., etc. That's why we have search engines and sites like HN -- to help us find the 1%. The existence of the other crappy 99% says pretty much nothing about the relative advantages of text vs. video.
A friend of mine has a special weakness for Venice (Italy) because it is one of the few place without any billboards, i.e. graphics everywhere.
It is not black and white but good food for thought.
I can vary a graphic element or photo a near infinite number of ways prior to inserting it via one tag. I wouldn't say that argues in favor of imagery over text, or vice versa, however.
Should black and white photography be the heart and soul of photography just because limitations (or costs) of technology started us there? I'm guessing you wouldn't argue that original intent should define future value, but these are all interesting points to discuss.
I think the article zooms in on text for "shock value", if you will, but there's a deeper point.
I trust you're not on Hacker News because of the aesthetically pleasing orange bar at the top of the page, you're here for the news, and the discussion. And that's what the article is getting at.
We get so wrapped up in the tech stack powering our websites, and oh so elaborate presentation layers, that we sometimes forget that what truly, really matters is the content encased in all that.
The point was that words are not the heart and soul of web design. There's nothing that argues in favor of an inherent bias to words over other forms of expression. That's my position.
Imagine the web without images. Maybe Boring, but largely functional. Now imagine the web without words.
I am thinking back when they named the protocol the HyperText Transport Protocol and the primary format the HyperText Markup Language, text was indeed the heart and soul of the medium.
At one point, images weren't even displayed inline but via a helper app. This is why Mosaic was a big deal.
HTTP has become a generic TCP wrapper for the common request->response pattern.
9792 42.750939000 74.125.109.232 10.1.1.21 TCP 1506 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]
RTMPT is RTMP over HTTP, but Youtube doesn't use it.
Yes, I'm being pedantic and annyoing.
I'll grant you that YouTube has a lot of cat videos, which probably doesn't have words in it. But those vlogs have a hell of a lot of words in them too.
---
A lot of video is streamed with RTMP, yes, but a lot of Netflix and YouTube content is available over HTTP now too (albeit in the contrived manner of chopping videos up into dozens of tiny files).
What the author extols in word is something quite effectively conveyed in many forms of art. Just as there is great beauty in the text of Baudelaire, there is incredible emotive power in koyaanisqatsi.
We should accept the author's challenge to behave with more conviction and purpose, to express ourselves in a more meaningful way. But to do so in word alone is too restrictive for the imagination to bear.
It is adapted from a Stephen King novel, having read it I can tell you you feel just as much.
I'd say that text is not only the heart and soul of the web, but also of motherfucking civilization. Animation and video are nice, and great adjuncts to text. But language is still the most common and easy way to store and share information intended to be consumed by humans, and since that's what the Web is all about, it's not only natural that the Web should be language-focused, but also unnatural that it be anything else.
One might also imagine how our understanding of, say, the Italian Renaissance might be affected were every painting to disappear, and then to reconsider the same scenario with every bit of writing erased. Both would be devastating, but as a student of human culture, I'd far prefer the former.
> Second, understanding text requires knowing how the
> information it contains is encoded (what language it
> is written in). Drawings are far more universal.
>No.
There's some strange dissonance going on in my head reading this on a site with practically no images at all.
Once images went inline, the web's focus moved from content to presentation, much to its detriment (in my humble opinion). We progressively became more at the mercy of the page designer rather than the copy editor.
I like a usable application interface as much as the next guy, and am quite happy to see native interfaces (even if they aren't my beloved WPF ;-) rise back into prominence so that the hyper-text transfer protocol can get back to carrying hyper-text.
I never implied that posters and commentators were doing web design while using this site; I started with a comment on the dissonance of reading a statement refuting the web as a textual medium on a site that is effectively only a textual medium.
You can argue that we can communicate using images, but that communication is limited when compared to words.
You can argue that we can communicate using sounds, but unless those sounds are words, the communication is limited in the same way as when using pure images.
You can argue that the Web is not only about communication between humans (e.g. we can do shopping online), but the communication is indispensable for all those other services.
You can argue that the Web is not only about communication between humans, but all that machine-to-machine communication is ultimately there to connect humans.
Web design is there to help you achieve whatever you're trying to do on the Web in a way that's more appealing and easier to interact with. I think that Justin's assertion is that words are at the heart of whatever you're trying to do on the Web. And I think he's dead on.
Like so many other things, it depends. When people are online looking to book a bed and breakfast, buy a pair of shoes or find a date, they tend to find images very valuable indeed. In fact, in the absence of images, many of the web's transactions would simply not happen.
It's not for nothing that we often say, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.
This sentence can support either side of the argument. I love it. Draw that sentence.
Various graphical images illustrating the choice caused more confusion than a short sentence for each.
We also found replacing text links with icons increased support requests from new users by a noticeable margin. AND when keeping the icons and restoring the text it was still above baseline
My view is that for length and complex ideas images or video can be illustrative. But for 90% of interactions text is always clearer.
Consider what works better:
* a description of a place and how to get there or a map
* a description of a floor plan or a diagram
* a description of someone's appearance or their photograph
* a description of a piece of clothing or its photograph
The OP said, "the most powerful tool on the web is still words". That might be true, but I disagree with CodeMage when s/he said that "words are at the heart of whatever you're trying to do on the Web". I don't believe that words are at the heart of Google Maps or Flickr or last.fm or countless other web properties that revolve around sound, images and video.
If pornography were wordless, would people stop watching it? Do people watch it now because of "communication"?
Words are important, but they are not of sole importance in general and in many cases are not of primary importance.
(Static) pictures usually don't have implied ordering of information, unlike words, and videos, which require serialized focus to perceive.
Written words allow a writer to communicate without being hindered or prejudged by things beyond his or her control, such as accent, rate of speech, sound of voice, or poor acoustics. A writer can rewrite and edit his or her words to say exactly what he or she wants, far more easily than one can edit a video or audio recording.
Electronic text is more amenable to analysis and manipulation (e.g. translation) by machine than any other human communication medium.
I'm not so sure about this, but written words might favor reason over emotion, especially if one can disable presentation hints.
For these reasons and more, the Web should be primarily about written words delivered as electronic text.
Except the novel, the poem, the play, the scientific paper, the biography, the corporate operating agreement, the rule of law...
This article is absolutely pointless. Great, you didn't use a CMS, your content is now harder to manage. Users can't register or comment, so where do they discuss your article? Wait, they have to go to another site to do that, one that isn't completely dated.
The web is about a story (not just words) and those can be told through a variety of mediums, but in this case, the author used words.
Yes.
I corrupt too many hours concerned with flash, and dressing words in garish nonsense. Minimalist HN is an excellent model to excise and distain word flash dreck, and images or whatever kind of vid snippet.
Look at HN's traffic, others agree.
With the myriad digressions of image, js, and html5 magic, it's difficult for me not to be seduced by other's new eye candy. But the best pages I like to find, are simplest original tty, possibly with a word centric CGI engine dynamically serving up what I want, or what I didn't know I want. Most often then not, these plain forged dynamic/static pages, I bookmark.
Some site's landing page ar so busy loading, to read what I want I drag-copy or 'print' if that's an option. If not, forget it, it's just too much painful nonsense spam or Las Vegas sequins headache to tolerate.
I'd also prefer a text browser, but gave up as none seem to keep up with required js, certificates-ssl, etc.
I'm no longer an infant, or a girl believing in fuschia unicorns, let's lose those brain-numbing colors too.
Why should anyone care whether a web-page is being read by a human using a cell-phone, from a terminal, by a blind person with a braile reader, an elderly man with essential tremor (hint: fiddly pop-up-and-disappear menus are really hard for some people), someone using JAWS or other screen reading technology, whether someone is actually not a someone at all, but a rather a computer program Jim wrote to alert him of news stories he might want to read. Why should we care if someone uses a mouse with or without a scroll-wheel, or if he has an 24-bit display?
It's frightening to think that the peak of web-accessibility may have been in the past, and that the web is getting harder, rather than easy to 'design for', as people slowly but surely continue to try and gobble up the browser's job of presenting content, so that they can get it to do display according to their own arbitrary sensibilities instead of expressing basic intent.
I decided to stick as close to plain HTML for my personal website as possible. The problem is, plain HTML is ugly. So instead, I tried to imagine what the default style of HTML would be if it was created today.
I've am still far from that ideal, but it is a work in progress: http://rkuykendall.com/
Vector, e.g. drawn with Canvas, would be better (e.g. with a fallback to a single colour png.)
(just checked, after refreshing my cache a few times, and it looks much better now, nice one.)
Generating the relevant shapes and lines for a simple logo would be easy this way, although probably would require a larger download vs. a vector image, since the canvas method would need to load extra javascript to duplicate the SVG support built in to the browser.
I'm not saying it is necessarily a better idea, just that I've had more success with canvas drawing methods than trying to actually make a vector image.
Another advantage is that you can handle generated images as images, not as code, without converting them to raster bitmaps (which I guess you'd be forced to when when dumping the canvas).
All browsers have SVG support now, webpages need only consist of text, vector graphics and photographs.
What OS/Browser are you using that destroys type like that?
To explain this a tiny bit further: Fully developed and professional fonts will have had attention put into them to ensure that they will look perfect in pixel-exact representation at any font size. The font you chose had that kind of work only put in for up to font size 8 or thereabouts and thus looks terrible.
http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png
I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.
<style type="text/css">
body { font-size:18px; }
.wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin:0 auto; }
</style>
http://weinzierlweb.com/words.txt
ASCII text, copied from Firefox, added links and emphasis manually and formatted with par in vim.
I once almost started a web site called SimpleStyleSheets that had that goal -- maximum of 4 lines of CSS, no ugly compression, maximum of 120 characters per line. And see how good you can make a page of simple semantic content look.
I should do it now -- it'd be a good exercise in this day of complex designs and bloated styles.
The point of the post wasn't: "un-style everything!"
The point was that simple, unadorned words on a page can be powerful and effective.
Oh wow he actually DID write that in a little city in British Columbia. I assumed he was pulling metadata and serving people different answers.
What we call unstyled really means that only the browsers default CSS is applied. To me that feels like the design of 1995, NCSA Mosaic, early Netscape and all that.
To get rid of that I applied Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS 2.0, it looks like this:
The point is that people have, at times, become a bit too obsessed with style, interactivity, pictures, colors, fonts, video, audio, etc. Sometimes, you just need to focus on the content. If a minimal stylesheet helps with that (just keeping a reasonable column width, and reasonable font size, to make the text readable), that doesn't really affect that message at all.
I find it a bit ironical that a manifesto for minimalism still carries Google Analytics code to track people.
I also needed a web server to host them, an FTP client to transfer them, plus the entire infrastructure of the web to make this work. ;)
So beneath the simplicity of "just words" is some complexity.
But all that stuff is invisible for most people visiting the page. The point is that simple words on a page can be powerful and effective.
"Art of Travel"[1] is one of those websites. When I read that website I was impressed how lovingly it was put together. The overall experience was so good that I didn't even think about evaluating its design.
One of my favorite of Hofstadter's essays. And thanks for your links.
PS: I kind of missed "all craftwardship is of the highest quality" in the page, though (or text that menaced with spikes of http or something.) I guess I'm too geeky today
Design should help accomplish business (or personal) goals. We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma.
"If additional styling, image, media, or script gives the audience something more - then add it."
Evidence? Examples?
Not debating the effectiveness of that kind of design, but rather pointing out the obviousness that this sort of anti-"always, ever" statement is easily validated.
I HATE the way web design has evolved. I want to make the design choices at my end, not have them imposed on me or consuming a ridiculous amount of bandwidth. Most of the design on the web is no good.
Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own.
I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is itself a "design sensibility" as you term it.
I have the skills and experience to retool my browsing experience for my more minimalist aesthetic, but most consumers experience the web as something more like an animated version of a supermarket checkout magazine. Since getting a smartphone a few years back, I've been especially struck by how much bandwidth is consumed on transmitting cruft on things like news stories, where the actual text is only a few kilobytes and relevant photographs take up no more than a few hundred kb; but after you pile on all the trackers, divs, ads, etc. etc. the page ends up being many megabytes and can easily take 30 seconds over a typical 3g connection.
To me that's enormously consumer-hostile to very little real publisher benefit; the more shit I have to download to see a page the less likely I am to consume news from that source and the more likely I am to reinforce my ad blockers etc. (whereas I will make exceptions for site that make restrained use of such things so they can get a little extra ad revenue or tracking data value in return for the service they provide).
Recently XKCD made me think about how minimalism fits into design. For example, entirely text-driven:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_pace_of_modern_life.png
... and more visually oriented:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/balloon_internet.png
Obviously there are many ways to communicate ideas, and each in various contexts can be quite effective.
I think such a software would have to be free, but I also believe it would change the way web design and advertising works if it caught on.
I didn't read it as a call to minimalism, more so as "It does not matter how flashy your site is, if in the end you have really nothing to say."
It's hard to disagree, honestly (it's also plain common sense, nothing groundbreaking, although the minimalist presentation really helps driving home the point).
If your content is pictures, the same philosophy applies: ditch any ornamentation that gets in the way, just post your damn pictures. If you're selling the pictures? Get the pictures out there and get the "buy" controls out there.
It's still minimalism, and all it's saying is: "if your goal is to show pictures, that fancy layout that pushes all your content into a slick grid of thumbnails, just so people can see some slick fly-out animation when they're clicked upon, is probably just wasting everyone's time."
Relying on words conflicts with the popular concept "show, don't tell". So I think the author's point only applies to a subset of web pages. From my perspective, I want to see screenshots of your app (or preferably try it with a non-signup demo) - I don't want to read a bleeding heart story about your motivation for it. Give me a tagline at best for that.
App web pages need to be designed like HyperCards or PowerPoint presentations - where you aim to lower the number of points on the screen to retain attention.
why are people still using this doctype:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
instead of the beautifully simple HTML5 doctype:
<!DOCTYPE html>
I get that people might use the old doctype out of habit, but it's such an ugly, unnecessary habit, and it would probably be smart to work on discarding it. At the very least, we should be making sure that new developers learn the new doctype.
I've just updated it. Thanks!
No. YouTube comments are words. They're also terrible. Also, images can be as powerful (or more so) than words.
IMO his thesis would be better stated as:
"But the most powerful tool on the web is still a compelling piece of content (words, image, video)"
The problem with all of the "You're reading this" and "You're still reading this" is that the only reason anyone read it is because of the author's networking, and in our case the fact that it was promoted up HN. That says nothing about the content of the page or its power. It'd be just as true and just as irrelevant if the author were the only one who ever read it.
Yes, I agree with some of what's presented. But I also think it's a very narrow and outdated way of looking at the web, and it marginalizes disciplines that, for better or worse, have effectively changed the way that most people experience and internalize the experience of browsing.
I didn't cover how to drive traffic to a web page; that'd be a great "sister topic" to this one.
As an aside: that little link at the bottom of that page has converted better than anything else I've done. ;)
> One of my friends is named Montreal,she is fun to play with
The web is also expanding every day to include more capabilities.
It is about way more than words. Let's not oversimplify it just because we think minimalism is cute.
I'm thinking of doing a redesign. ;)
To be fair, in both cases I started with a simple text file on my computer. After that I send them as a plain-text email to friends for review. And then I publish on the fancy website.
I don't think there's anything wrong with pictures or colors.
"If that additional styling or image gives the audience more understanding - then add it."
At this point, I think I can experiment more with taking things out. Maybe that's where I'll start with my websites.
- 1.6% of yahoo.com size (477KB)
- 18.9% of reddit.com size (41.2 KB)
- 23.6% of stackoverflow.com size (33KB)
- 108.3% of gmail.com size (7.2KB)
- 520% of google.com size (1.5KB)
- 866.6% of your blog post size (908B)
edit: the most surprising is gmail.com for me, id have thought they load tons of js in the background. but maybe so does hn?
Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.
edit: OK so in Incognito Mode i got 17KB which is a bit more believable, but why doesnt it show that in normal mode with disabled cache?
The largest file I see is the ?shva=1 /mail/u/0 file, clocking in at 173KB.
Less is more with such devices, especially bold text. I'm not a skimmer by nature, but when a post is full of bold text I find myself involuntarily skimming the bolded parts, because they have such a higher visual weight than the rest of the text. It's almost as though those words are shouted, and it becomes harder to hear the rest of the text.
Simply paying close attention to the flow of your writing can usually give a sufficient sense of emphasis without resorting to special formatting.
Just think — we treat text as our user interface!
High quality content + focus on readability = bliss.
I read it with my own style - so that it is just words.
A few issues I have with it, is the contrast, the bright background, and when you zoom in, the text isn't fluid so soon flys out the side of the browser.
And I have to restyle most of the articles that are linked from HN so I can read them too.
Any article of any length ends up on my eReader - which is particularly no frills but readable.
Interesting irony. ;)
The Web is for sure a place to communicate with words. But can you imagine what will it look like if every web page will have only words? I can't. I wouldn't enjoy it anymore.
As a UI designer, I always try to create an interface as intuitive as possible, and sometimes words do work better than icons and images. But sometimes it will break the concept. Let's take Airbnb as an example.
If we'll remove all those attractive images and UI elements, which create its particular universe, Airbnb will look like Craigslist (though some apts have pictures today). And it won't be fun!
Both words and images play important roles in the web design. The role of the words is to communicate an idea. The role of the images is to illustrate the idea and to bring an additional value to the content.
What I'm obsessed with is the fact every god damned web site on the internet includes google-analytics stuff! You would have made your point had you left it out.
Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation or more sites like traditional newspapers that throw 100 links, 10 ads, pop-us about related articles, and other crap at you?
I would expect something that's focused on the content would eliminate the top/side bars, and show me the actual content. Annoyingly, NoScript (which often makes newspapers' web sites quite tolerable) doesn't appear to remove qz.com's clutter.
For instance, the right-hand sidebar is totally pointless and serves no purpose other than to push the scroll bar into a weird position. The header at the top is just meaningless clutter. Why does the left side-bar need to exist? Why can't the links to other articles just scroll with the rest of the page (the '90s called, they want their frames back)?
Sure, Quartz is somewhat less cluttered than Huffpo, but Huffpo doesn't claim to be about simplicity, Quartz does, I find that infuriating.
For a site that's full of content, they make it hard to get that content. If they were failing at a hard problem, I'd be more sympathetic, but overcomplicating the business of putting text on a screen to that extent is just inexcusably narcissistic.
The sheltered character was astounded that he looked at squiggles on a page, and through which was able to know something about the world. "Wizardry", was I think the word used.
But when you break communication down to what it is, ideas and knowledge abstracted so they can be externalized, it's pretty fucking amazing.
This article spoke to the idea that we often start our endeavours in the wrong place. We start off trying to find the flashy angle and trying to hit all the write aesthetic notes before we even know what we are trying to communicate.
We should start our process by making a clear and distinct communication and filling our sites with content --the meat-- and then building everything else around that.
If the thesis of this editorial is "add only which serves to aid in achieving the spec/goal", I agree. But there is an implicit danger here as well of underestimating the total needs of the resource's end user.
Please, when creating content, concentrate on the words first. There are some obvious exceptions, but almost always the words are most important.
You can then add the markup, and the css, and the javascript, and all the other stuff.
But having great copy means that your visitors will always have good quality content even if they turn all that other stuff off.
sigh
No snarks: it displays perfectly on phone screens and large monitors and loads fast. How could it be made more responsive.
I think the key to responsiveness is to remove all javascript, all unnecessary styling, and most importantly to remove all dynamic social features. Then you have an html static page with long cache life.
Just dumping textfiles into an open directory honestly would've been more productive (if less fun.)
...the author made the choice to display the text at 600px wide with a font size of 18px. There's plenty of markup (design) to point out key ideas on the page.
Would this writing have the same impact if the font was at 12px, with smaller spacing between paragraphs, or maybe with a page width of 1280px? I don't think so.
Yes. Of course. Books don't need precise pixel rules to be readable.
Simple, minimalist, publish through markdown. I stripped the Twitter button out of my fork because I thought even that was too much clutter (example: http://notes.darkfunction.com). Now I have just a list of articles, with a link to each article, and I can't think why I would need any more. I always found article history navigation on traditional bogs tedious (how am I supposed to know which month/year you wrote what I am looking for?) and as for social media buttons, if I want to put your post on my Facebook page I don't need a button to do it.
The post at least highlights that 'web design' is somewhat of a distraction.
There is so much (unnecessary?) labour involved in framing the content by posturing programmers (lost down some rabbit hole) and anal pixel pushers that you could easily forget that to many: the content is what matters.
Getting your head around HTML, publishing and hosting is still not that trivial. That's why people take to something like Facebook, or sharing photos via Instagram via their mobile phones.
That's not to detract from the beauty and the 'miracle' of web publishing.
Jump to today and the Google search yields following the obvious wikipedia link, is a whole bunch of wikihow, nytimes, urban dictionary and youtube links.
Those personal web pages with an intellectually rich content have just been lost to the dark internet.
Briefly, they would say that an effective ideological argument stems from style--two films with the exact same script that are shot, set, lit, and edited differently could have totally different meanings. So, what's most interesting is that your argument perhaps isn't actually about words or content -- it's about the way those words and content are presented.
Also, often a great picture is greater than many words. And the web is equally powerful for that.
All of the elements I just described are made up of words and/or represent words.
Sure designers can lose their way and become engrossed in decorating elements (which in some cases becomes a USP), but that's not typically the end goal.
I wondered how it worked w/o asking employees to sign up for anything, and this is what I found:
"What they came up with was Know Your Company, which poses one question to all employees via email, three days a week.
The queries vary from day to day. Responding is optional, and answers are attached to employee names.
Workers can also choose whether they want their replies shared with the whole group."
This[1] is a very important and meaningful symbol in any language.
[1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/A14...
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26a0/index.htm
Related: In my head, webpages should visually only consist of vector graphics and photographs. You can put JPEG's in SVG's, so there is no reason to rasterize hybrids.
> "We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things."
When we didn't have those fancy things, we wanted them. If they were taken away, we'd want them back. Nothing wrong with fancy presentation if your intention is to present something.
The first thing I ever did on the internet back in the 90s was look up guitar tab for beginners. I skipped the words and printed out the guitar tabs I found.
The author of "this is a web page" is flogging a book. That's nice, but I don't really think that reading his words is "magical".
Oxygen is magical. Gravity is magical. Magic is everywhere. Can we please move on to the magical things that actually stand out as deserving such a label relative to where we are in online evolution?
The internet of things is settling in nicely, and it isn't about words, it's about things. Linking data and real-time manipulation from online to things in our immediate and remote environments. THAT is closer to magic than plain text on a white page.
If you're going to praise the power of words, you might want to start with spelling them correctly.
A lot of people (below) have commented that they like HN because it is just text and links on a page.
But the fact it appears simple doesn't mean no design's gone into it. It's still visually appealing.
I suspect if HN was just <h1> <h2> that, regardless of its content, it'd have a lot less traffic.
I think HN is a perfect example of what he is arguing.
A Webpage is designed to be reached by anyone, anywhere, and now...can be read (at least the words) in different languages. I love text just for the global demographic that it can reach thanks to online translators like Google and Bing!
minimalistic - let the content speak for the site, not the fancy design
What's horrible about the article? It's straightforward, conventional typography of the sort used in printed books for a long time.
I like sites with some design pizazz, but a simple page like this with well-written content trumps most over-designed, over-widgetized crap sites any day.
Imagine: a world in which you could choose your preferred font for reading websites! Sure, most people would choose Comic Sans, but that would be better than making people download some super-thin font that looks great on (and only on) the designer's Retina display.
1. He doesn't have an RSS feed. That's a medium many people use it to connect.
2. He doesn't have a mailchimp (or other) list to subscribe to. That's another medium people use.
3. He didn't optimize for Google. That's a huge medium people use to reach content. (he uses analytics, though. guess why)
4. Font size is set in pixels. This is the wrong way to do it if you want to be optimized for reading. You should set it in "em" to have the size of the browser default. Another reason why you need a professional to design a site.
It's true that we are sometimes (or in many occasions) taking the features to the extreme. But there is a reason why they are there. That's the new web. Learn how to use the feature to improve the experience, and not to make it worse.
Not using is just moving us backward.
It misses the point entirely and concentrates on the banality of the medium rather than the message.
The new web is the old web, rehashed with less content and more money making prospects through complicated meshes of dross leeched from the veins of media startups.
Not using is putting the message first for a change and I applaud that.
The guy is arguing that we don't need software then, since it is possible to create every page by hand.
That's why, for instance, even with the driest of academic textbooks, they still spend a few extra dollars on a cover design.
My next website is sitting in Tomboy Notes at the moment. I'm just about to start coding.
Let's assume every webpage is made to be liked (I'm an optimist). Hopefully you see the madness of like buttons now.
Modern, design based websites, are the equivalent of magazines. People would rather read the Economist in color than (insert newspaper here) in black and white by far.
And you can sell plenty with just words. I'm not harking on design. I think design is just important as anything else is. What I am saying is that words are like vital to life itself. Just like air, water, and food is.
If every page did this then a contrary page with images would make the point against just words and everyone would agree.
Looking at simple page's like that all day would be depressing, I want beauty in my life, not just words which can be beautiful, that's why I read novels, I also want visual beauty.
Pretentious drivel more like.
I'll often read the comments briefly first before deciding if I want to read an article.
I don't do this for all articles, but it is a pretty common occurrence.
Too lazy; didn't hire
His blog, e.g. http://justinjackson.ca/the-principle-that-changed-my-life/, seems to follow pretty mainstream design ideas.