Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013)

> With regards to visual design, the fact is that any individual has a far better idea of what constitutes comfortable-to-read text for them than a designer could. A designer either designing for his or her own tastes or trying to find some best-of-all-worlds design will ultimately fail to satisfy the vast majority of visitors to the sit

> Designers, it may come as a surprise to you, but not everyone loves your work.

Computer scientist, it may come as a surprise to you, but there are competent people outside of your field of expertise. You're not a genius, and everyone else isn't stupid.

If a designer (or whoever decides) chooses to have custom fonts, client-side scripting or custom style sheets, it's because he weighted the downsides of said choice and still opted for it. If he did not, or he is not aware of the downsides, then it's a matter of incompetence, not web design. So, your pseudo-manifesto should be anti-incompetence, not anti-web-design.

Being "anti-web-design" only tells us that a) you know nothing about design (you don't have the smallest idea regarding methodology or even simply what a designer actually does); and b) it's no more than a rant - all your valid points (which are a few) are obscured by the arrogant and oblivious attitude.

Of course the web is full of crap design – there's a very low barrier to entry. That's a good thing. There's also some great design. And a lot of in-between stuff (otherwise decent sites compromised by too many ads/scripts). It serves whoever pays for it and makes it. Don't use it if you find it 'abusive'. This guy needs to get over himself.

This probably depends on the browser but Safari, for example, scales inches (and centimetres) with the zoom level, so the result is probably the same. I don't like em and rem much as they do not really reflect the actual size in tangible units, but that is largely a personal preference.

Is it really that bad?

Most of the web is about reading content, and this is where all points on the page shine.

I agree with basically everything on that page.

In fact, we built fully-fledged browser extensions to override website's choices in fonts, colors and whatnot (point 1).

We build extensions to kill js by default (point 2).

We increasingly disable plugins by default (point 3).

We have extensions to block advertising, including inline ones (point 4).

Frames are a thing of the past (point 5), although visual clutter still reigns in "web tabloids" (although we still patch the css via custom styles/extensions)

6) Web fonts have very often poor hinting and lower quality than the exact equivalent in the system. The difference between my locally installed Roboto font and the Woff version is insane. The worst part is that the google font loaders loads the woff version ANYWAY!

Web tablois will still chose random fonts based purely on the looks. Combined with poor hinting, this has prompted me to disable web fonts on my standard browsing profile.

Of course, nobody wants tracking, this seems quite widespread now, with browsers including the useless DNT header (point 7)

"No pagination" went even overboard with continuous loading pages, which many (including myself) hate (point 8).

What about the "facebook/linkedin" login that many websites/betas require to join, and that almost everybody hates? (point 9)

And when all you need to do is reading, you don't want over-the-top animations when you hover on this, dynamic loading that prevents pages to be saved to disk for later reading, and whatever webdesigners think "it's cool" nowdays, because in the end what matters most is the content.

The fact that we have "reader modes" in browsers now is pretty saddening. And it's all due to massive, abusive design using otherwise good browsers extensions.

And this one could not care less.

Seriously, i looked over the page and could not tell the difference for the most part. Only ones i noticed some difference was those where you had a single prominent letter doing all the work.