This is a motherfucking website. And it’s fucking not completely perfect
twentyoheight.wordpress.com
twentyoheight.wordpress.com
If every website were designed like the "motherfucking website", I could design a "browsing theme" where all lines were 66 characters long. If there were some navigation metadata in there, I could theme the browser to show that as a viewport at the top. I could change the aesthetics to the user's preference.
Not that there's anything that can be done about it from this equilibrium, but I think the problem is that people got it in their head that they should be able to control how users view their sites, and that's wrong. If you consider markup to be metadata about how your data should be displayed, then you shouldn't have to do any QA testing or cross-device testing, because the onus of design would be on the browser. You'd choose a browser that displays websites the way you like to see them. Everything would be automatically 100% cross-platform and accessible, because you're not trying to use markup to force a specific way of viewing your site.
Honestly, the hubris of designers can be amazing. As if aesthetics is a universal. Maybe some people prefer 100 lines of text per line. Maybe some people want to zoom a mobile site. It's so incredibly difficult to specifically create a single (or even adaptive) design that works for blind people, people with every different kind of colorblindness, people using every browser on the market on devices with vastly different screen sizes and resolutions, people with every kind of character set and a million different aesthetic preferences you've never even thought of. And yet it's so easy to just put your content up there with markup suggestions about how it should be displayed and let users choose how they want to see it. They'll do your work for you.
Hell, if you wanted to keep the current "status quo" where every site has its own theme, you could just bundle sites with themes, and have an option in the browser to "automatically accept per-site themes". At least then you wouldn't be shutting out users with peripheral preferences.
See Internet Explorer & Flash.
The web is designed precisely to dump text from a digital typewriter. And the visual design can be universal or customized by a user.
This poses a minor problem because if actually implemented as intended, thousands of designers would be out of work. You'd need very few to make universal text display themes and occasionally improve them. And more complex UIs could be handled with something like bootstrap.
But there are far more people with the print designer mindset, recreating the old world in digital form, then there are visionary designers like Doug Engelbart who wanted to use computers to do new things. And you can't just retrain those people to not spend their lives changing line lengths and text colors to shove ads and make display cases, that's all they know. It's an economics problem.
There are plenty of these smartest and best people trying startups and they're not really measuring up to what computer pioneers imagined. Seems the best we can do for Engelbart's complex topic discussion systems are Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit and HN.
HN's designer Paul Graham subscribes to Job's idea of simple, minimalist interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell.
For reference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q
This is the most design-ignorant post I've seen on HN in a long time, and I think this quote really highlights what's wrong with it. No, not all pages have navigation that can be put in some One True Hierarchy metadata style. To take five high-volume sites as example: Facebook, Bank of America, Google Search, Google Docs, and Google Maps all have fundamentally different usage patterns that simply would not work if styled in remotely the same way.
Yes, if all pages were just essays with occasional links (as they were in the 90's), then pages w/o site-provided CSS would be great and you could use user styles for all your customization (FYI, feel free to click View > Page Style > No Style in your menu bar to do this for yourself). Cool, but it's 2014 now, and people expect their websites to be native-competitive applications that allow them to get things done quickly.
> Honestly, the hubris of designers can be amazing. As if aesthetics is a universal.
another choice quote. FYI, design has very little to do with aesthetics; Design is how something works. Aesthetics is just one tool that should help to make clear how something works.
> They'll do your work for you.
No. No they won't. They'll leave your site for one that is easier to understand and use, where they can do as little work as possible to get done what they want to get done. If you disagree, go try to prove it in the marketplace. I think the market has made quite clear what level of design users prefer.
At which point you end up with yet another site that takes up over 1/3 of the viewport with a navigation bar on many phones held in landscape.
Or go Wikipedia style with search and in context links.
Takes minimum space, works great on a mobile phone, you can type the first characters to jump to a certain point in the options, has good accesibility support, etc.
If only it was 1994 and people could resize their 'viewport' to get the line length they prefer, instead of having snobby designers force it to be what they value.
Only it's 2014, and people have 10+ tabs open. They can be bothered to resize the browser size for each and everyone of them. And some prefer the browser to be full screen, etc.
I feel like I was taught at one point that the web was supposed to be flat HTML/HTTP and that interactive stuff was supposed to be reserved for applications. Did that used to be a thing?
Err, no, multi-column layout sucks (you have to scroll back to the top to read the next column). And pagination sucks too.
Just make the text take 70 or so characters wide.
/s
In what other language is it a good idea to compile the entire standard library each time the program is run?