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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

"At it's heart, web design should be about words."

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.

View on HN

And yet you chose to present your ideas using words. At the heart of the Web is the communication between humans. At the heart of that communication are words.

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.

> You can argue that we can communicate using images, but that communication is limited when compared to words.

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'.

"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.

It's funny but this is not really true. We've just finished a massive UI test involving a choice our users have to make during sign up.

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.

Your example doesn't invalidate my point at all because it's restricted to one particular situation: signing up for something. If you were selling shoes online instead, I think you'd be much more likely to agree with me on the importance of images, which would simply prove my point that "it depends".

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.

I don't think anyone is completely devaluing images in communicating things; they just assign images to a lower priority in the communication order, one that is supportive rather than primary. Without the context of buying shoes, pictures of shoes tell me nothing. I can fill those shoes with all sorts of stories.

(Static) pictures usually don't have implied ordering of information, unlike words, and videos, which require serialized focus to perceive.

One word (pun intended): Hieroglyphs.

It's unfortunate that the article doesn't try to actually make the case for the primacy of linguistic communication, and I'm not going to take the time to do it here either. I'll just say that while I agree with you that a diversity of media is better than just one medium, I spent my childhood, before the Web was built, reading books instead of watching TV on purpose, not by accident. Books without pictures. And it's not an accident that I'm answering you in text instead of using my webcam.

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.

Do you have a good citation for the primacy of linguistic communication?

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.

I feel that words are the best way to communicate because words are born purely out of us; they are literally our thoughts in physical form. Videos, music, pictures, are all representations of physical things in the world around us; words are representations of the worlds inside us.

I sometimes have a hard time putting certain thoughts or feelings in to words, in which case I either draw a picture, play a melody, or use one of the other myriad forms of expression available to me to communicate with others. I in no way feel like I am translating these thoughts from words to these other forms of expression. I have a much easier time singing a melody than transcribing it. I have to force the music to comply with written forms.

> Videos, music, pictures, are all representations of physical things in the world around us; words are representations of the worlds inside us.

What about music, sounds?

Al Gore articulates the value of text well in _The Assault on Reason_. Short version: text is a "cool" medium which only indirectly rouses emotion, while images, sounds and especially video are "hot" mediums that are much more likely to bypass the prefrontal cortex, and directly stimulate emotional reactions.

That sounds like it derives from McLuhan's theories in "Understanding Media: Extensions of Man", a book I'm currently reading.

Ah, you are correct! Gore's book is merely where I learned it from.

I'm not sure it is universal. I love the written word [1]. You can be precise and make nuanced arguments with caveats and qualifications where required. You can skim when reading it in a way you can't[2] with video. However some things are better and more easily shown than explained and some people have a preference for visual explanations.

[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.

A good citation? It's a value judgment.

Maybe you should try expressing it with a picture :P

> I have much more frequently seen video whose author had deluded himself into thinking it was beautiful.

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.

Point — but you're even less optimistic than Gresham!

I meant Sturgeon.

>The web is not just a place for text/words, that is not its heart and soul... It really never has been.

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.

Yeah, that's all fine and dandy, but what if we measure "what the web is for" in bandwidth? What do most people use the web "for"? Netflix and YouTube, I'd wager.

No, you are thinking of TCP. This is an article about HTTP. (in terms of bandwidth, HTTP ⊆ TCP)

Pretty sure YouTube is transported over HTTP. Not sure about Netflix but I wouldn't be surprised.

HTTP has become a generic TCP wrapper for the common request->response pattern.

Wireshark doesn't think so:

9792 42.750939000 74.125.109.232 10.1.1.21 TCP 1506 [TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]

Dunno, I tried loading a YouTube page and capturing packets. Only ports in use were 443 and 80, even to the cdn-like hostnames (bla.c.youtube.com). First packet shows "GET /videoplayback?...."

A port number is just a port number, it doesn't define what protocol is in use. You can serve different protocols across it - the limitation is that generally you can only have one service listening on a port number. A youtube page will require a couple of different protocols.

Youtube uses RTMP on port 80.

RTMPT is RTMP over HTTP, but Youtube doesn't use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Time_Messaging_Protocol

It is not transported over HTTP, although it does make use of HTTP at the Application Layer. It is transported over TCP, which is a Transport Layer protocol.

Yes, I'm being pedantic and annyoing.

People are using HTTP as a transport layer, e.g., websockets.

Websockets are the transport layer, built over TCP. Websockets happens to use HTTP as a protocol. That doesn't mean HTTP is the transport layer.

The heart of most TV Shows and Movies? A screenplay. Words. Dressed up with faces and costumes and animation, but words nonetheless.

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).

Words put to effect with the breadth of human expression captured through full motion video. I challenge one to read the screenplay for Shawshank and feel half as much.

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.

> I challenge one to read the screenplay for Shawshank and feel half as much.

It is adapted from a Stephen King novel, having read it I can tell you you feel just as much.

Porn and cat pictures.

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.

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.

Drawings are the heart and soul of civilization. For one, they originated ~37 thousand years before the first written language. Second, understanding text requires knowing how the information it contains is encoded (what language it is written in). Drawings are far more universal.

Perhaps, but Classical Greek civilization remains startlingly intelligible to us after 2500 years. We stare up at the paintings on the caves at Lascaux having only the vaguest idea what they mean (and that's hardly the most recent example).

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.

The fact that images pre-date anything vaguely similar to what we call civilisation shows that the two are not causally linked. Words /are/ causally linked with civilisation.

And I read picture books before I graduated to books with text and chapters.

It is speech that is most universal -- words. Drawing came after, and relegated to being foci of rituals and stories that were spoken and symbolic of spoken agreements.

  > Second, understanding text requires knowing how the 
  > information it contains is encoded (what language it
  > is written in). Drawings are far more universal.

So you're saying that you can look at those old drawings and understand what they mean?

I agree. Also, upvoted for motherfucking civilization.

Isn't there a difference between text and language? I see a lot of these comments getting them confused.

'language' != 'text'. When you're having an intimate moment with your significant other, do you use your voice to convey your love, or do you write it down on a bit of paper?

Words delivered as electronic text are a great equalizer, for both the writer and the reader. Words impose no accessibility barriers for people with sensory disabilities. Words require minimal bandwidth. Even for readers with no significant disability or bandwidth limitation, words are great because the reader can read them in whatever way he or she sees fit (computer screen, e-ink display, printed page, text-to-speech).

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.

>>"At it's heart, web design should be about words."

>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 don't think posting a comment counts as "web design". Nobody said "writing comments shouldn't be about words".

There is a "design" to this page. It just doesn't include pictures, videos, hover bars, animated banners, nor advertisements for weird tricks to lose weight. This site is about the flow of textual information.

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.

The people who built HN did the web design you speak of; Web design is not what users posting comments are doing.

Yes (except I am not speaking, I'm whispering).

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.

On the other hand, yesterday there was a discussion on HN of Steve Jobs remark that his legacy won't survive long, because technology quickly becomes obsolete:

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.

This opens a question on what exactly elements of web design are of course. Some would claim content isn't an element of design, others would claim the opposite.

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).

not technology but tool. apple // was tool. It is obsolete. Netscape was a tool. Obsolete. Is TCP/IP obsolete?

The trend of today is sticky headers. Tomorrow it will look rediculuous. Is it tech? No. It's the matter of fashion.

Technology is tools.

Sites made ten years ago with a design that focuses on the text still look good. Sites with a more "visual" design, even one that was very well regarded at the time, look far more dated.

"At it's heart, web design should be about 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.

I honestly believe that we could fix HTML by stripping javascript out, or narrowing its scope such that it was incapable of asking anything about the presentation of content and interface devices.

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 see no great argument in favour of words being the core over any other form of expression.

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.

Right, and there's a very strong argument to be made for a text focus on Hacker News. As I said, it depends on what the purpose of a site / web page / etc. is.

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.

Of course words are more important.

Imagine the web without images. Maybe Boring, but largely functional. Now imagine the web without words.

I see no great argument in favor of words being the core of any other form of expression.

Except the novel, the poem, the play, the scientific paper, the biography, the corporate operating agreement, the rule of law...

I think the authors point is that good content is more important than form and not that graphics and media should be forbidden. It just happens that HN is an excellent example for that - people come here for the content and not for fancy design, graphics and media.

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 think his point is that it's a communication system that facilitates communication amongst everyone. And everyone can communicate in words, typed out[0]. And not everyone can produce or effectively communicate using beautiful video, high quality graphics and, I guess, responsive design. [1]

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.

Everyone can communicate in words? That isn't true, unfortunately. I don't see why you even said that, only to negate it at the bottom.

More people can digest a photo than can read a specific language, by a radical margin.

All of your contributions seem to denote someone who doesn't really have anything worthwhile to convey in writing. Try to communicate "Hire me, I'm experienced." in a photo. Share that on Facebook.

If you're going to attempt to insult me personally (instead of focusing on the content of my posts), in words, I'd prefer that you put in more effort if we're talking about things that are worthwhile.

> All of your contributions seem to denote someone who doesn't really have anything worthwhile to convey in writing.

Please refrain from this sort of ad hominem response, it adds nothing to conversation.

I agree that an individual pictures or movie has the potential to be understood by a larger number of people. Even by a "radical" margin. :) However, that's not a unique feature of the Internet, it's similar in all means of communication. In media older than the Internet, pictures and movies have had an impact across linguistic communities.

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.

> And everyone can communicate in words, typed out

Obviously false, or else answer me in Cherokee, Tamil, Hindi, and Latin.

Images can be understood beyond the bounds of a single language.

Likewise false, or else find me an image that very clearly indicates the same content as, say, the Gettysburg Address.

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.

Images can be perceived and a narrative constructed regardless of language, but this may not be the same narrative the creator intended, in which case, nothing was communicated.

Those languages use words.

How many of those languages contain words you understand?

Written language is a system of images — sometimes with phonetic significance, sometimes ideogramatic.

"not everyone can produce [...] responsive design"

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 would actually argue that raw text is not 'responsive,' because column widths that are as wide as a large monitor are incredibly difficult to read.

That's a good point, but you are sort of redefining responsive. The unstyled HTML (not raw text) will still flow to any size window. The problem you mention can be fixed with a "max width", as in the original article.

I'm not sure that there's a universally agreed upon definition, but I think my comment certainly is relevant if we go by the one on Wikipedia: "Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)."

I've never understood this attitude. If your monitor is too wide for comfortable reading, don't maximize your browser. Why would you ever want a window that was 2/3 white margins? Site makers: please please please let your text expand to the width of my browser. I made my browser that wide because I like it that way.

While your argument seems persuading at first read, a second glance makes it clear that it's a refute just for the sake of it.

In defense of words, hypertext markup language has a lot of tags for words (more than I could count on two hands) vs two hands worth for images, pictures, video, etc combined. Throw in CSS (which makes words pretty) and you have a lot of stuff to do with words, and not that much to do with arrays of pixels or sine waves.

Ok, but I'm not sure how the quantity of tags determines the value of the content contained.

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.

I'm not arguing the value of the content, just the original intent. HTML was just meant to be a markup document language to display rich text over http.

I definitely get you on that. Does that original intent say anything of whether words should be the heart and soul of web design 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.

This argument really irritates me. Apart from all of the excellent reasons that other commenters have given as to why this is false, the fact that programs such as Instagram are as popular as they are, /that do nothing other than remove everything but the text from a page/, shows this is false.

It's funny... there haven't been many photo responses in this HN thread. ;)

Agreed. At it's heart, web design should be about conveying information effectively.

Agreed. The internet is essentially about information. Words are a subset of information transmission. What we can take away from this page though, is that information should not be obstructed by cruft. I agree with that.

Agreed. The author is assuming our capacity for communication is/should be text based. We're visual beings as well, and aesthetics is a lubricant for effective communication.

Absolutely. I clearly should have posted this on Instagram. ;)

change "words" to "content".

I don't think so. That isn't what the person said. Their entire post was built around stripping down web design to the words. In fact, the author was very precise in the usage of the term "words."

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.

He was taking a stab at visual design / aesthetics being prioritized over content when building a product.

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.

Nowhere did the author actually say that.

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.

I have never seen a still image that conveyed the horror of the Holocaust to me in the way that Elie Wiesel's Night did. I have seen a movie that did: Schindler's List, which was fiction, made with actors; and which was made at enormous expense because of the things people had said and written.

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.

> That's why 3/4 of all the posts on Reddit's home page are links to imgur

They still have titles. And many of those posts are memes that have words in them.

OP here. My point wasn't that we should remove all other types of media from the web. (I love other types of media)

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)

I would go one step further, and say that while images are very popular on the internet, most are light on meaning.

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.

Right. The majority of images on webpages are the design elements, not the photos. His point would still stand if he included a relevant image inline. Focus goes to the content, not the chrome.

A good example - http://stallman.org/

Horrendous on the eye but gives everything you need. And more.

I think that if you replace "words" with "story" then he hit the nail on the head.

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.

Your post reminds me of http://www.ftrain.com/wwic.html.

Show me a good, informative webpage without words.

I agree. I think the old way was about content now it's about a apps. One of those, if good, solves a problem.

Exactly.. without the graphics, audio, plugins, etc... it may as well be gopher, which most browsers don't even support anymore.

I don't get why the above post is so inflamatory to some... I used to use gopher, don't recall the ui all that well, but it was useful. Most browsers early on supported gopher as a protocol, and most do not today. And without the support of richer media (from images, to audio, scripting, even plugins) the web would not have been nearly as successful.

Agreed. If you want static text pages, go back to the 90s. We didn't feel very connected then, and there wasn't a big sense of community. It was mostly people publishing static pages for others to consume. Not much fun. Things have changed for a reason, and the internet has become a much more powerful place.

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.

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