Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013)

>You changed your point then.

No, I did not and - if you don't mind - I would suggest you spend some more time reading and analysing, instead of skim-reading and assuming my argument matches one of the predefined "boxes" you have. See below:

>If you meant to say that "it has nothing to do with web design" then you should have said that

Well, I did. How explicit do I have to be? I said: "then it's a matter of incompetence, not web design".

> instead of trying to defend "competent web designers"

Defend competent web designers? Again, it's a matter of competence. I defended competence - either from designers, programmers or PMs, "whoever decides" (as I stated, very explicitly).

> as if competence actually had anything to do with it.

As if? This is starting to sound very troll-like behaviour. From the beginning, I made it clear that this was about competence.

As if competence in web design had anything to do with it. There's a subtle difference there. Rage harder though dude, it's Friday!

Someone who bitterly states that "you know nothing about design" is obviously a web designer who is personally insulted by this article, who is obviously defending "web design competence".

You've been arguing that "web design competence" is key here since you said that " 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". As if.... but no, they add things we don't like because they have to. That's all you had to say. I think we agree otherwise, so whatever no big deal...

One point not mentioned in the OP: the people in charge of Firefox, Opera and Chrome have been and will continue to be a hindrance, not a help, on net to users who agree with the manifesto. The qualifier "on net" is intended to acknowledge that they do some pro-manifesto things, such as allowing any user to install any third-party extension, but that those things are cancelled out by anti-manifesto things, such as web fonts. (Note that these years, the company behind Opera gets most of their revenue from advertising.)

The people in charge of Safari, Edge and Internet Explorer have not been much of a help either although I suppose there is a chance that will change some day since their sponsors don't make most of their money from advertisers and other professional persuaders. (Although one could argue that the people in charge of Internet Explorer helped a lot in the 1990s and the first half of the last decade, I have seen no signs that they have been helping since then.)

Sometimes I think that the only way for users who agree with the manifesto to get free of the need for regularly writing new user CSS, installing new add-ons and extension and continuing to tweak about:config settings is for them to migrate to a browser whose maintainers have some sympathy for the manifesto.

I sometimes believe that what I just wrote would make a good business plan for a startup.

If I were to buy a phone or a tablet today, I would probably choose one from Apple just because of the content-blocking API Apple promised for iOS 9. (Yes, theoretically, the fact that much or most of Android is open source makes it possible for some new organization or project to offer an Android fork that offers even better ad-blocking than iOS 9 will allow, but after 23 years of experience with open-source software, I know that merely the existence of a particular software freedom does not mean that programmers and designers will do the hard work of converting that freedom into actual code that I will want to use.)

Yes. There is a difference between optimizing the design of the parts of the web which are for reading text, or filtering the web as it is to your liking through plugins or whatnot, and forbidding the web from ever being about anything more than simply reading text.

Because of course, most people don't have a problem with the web as it is, except maybe for a few details like intrusive advertising which could be done away with without eliminating javascript, css and layout complexity entirely. They use it, and enjoy it, and it brings value to their lives.

Insisting that the web is wrong, that most of the people using it are wrong to accept it, that most of the creative decisions made in it are wrong for even attempting to design it, that every possible use of javascript is wrong by definition, and that the only "proper" web is one in which simple, static text documents be allowed to exist is, yes, "really that bad."

Reader mode in Safari and Firefox comes close. Try Readability, Pocket, or Instapaper for example.