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The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

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Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#61

Post by meowface »

criley2 wrote: post #29
lukasm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles.

>"That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles." Am I the only one who thinks that the whitespace heavy and well designed NYT modern site is better? Good line height, good type choice, very good readability. As opposed to times new roman at 1.0 line height, is that really the pinnacle of readability? Eight grade book report format?

I agree. With ad block on, I think the current NYT site is very nice to read.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#62

Post by mattdotc »

jrcii wrote: post #45
hackuser wrote: post #41

After 20 years, they still are adapting to the 'new' platform. Look through their site with fresh eyes: If you were designing a news website (rather than moving a newspaper to this new platform), how many design, UI and functionality choices would you make differently? A quick start: * The separation of different forms of content: They don't really mix text with video, images and graphics, even though most web-native…

> how many design, UI and functionality choices would you make differently? I'd start by not hijacking clicks with JavaScript. In Firefox, double clicking the body of the article (which I do often to search for terms in the article) changes the font size (??), clicking in some parts of the body activates a link to another article. It's been like this for years.

Do you have another computer to try that on or perhaps start your browser without add-ons?

I use Firefox as my main browser and read nytimes.com every day. I haven't experienced any of those behaviors, nor am I able to replicate them.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#63

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

joe5150 wrote: post #57
whyenot wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $15 a month (3.75/wk). I don't know why you believe the cost is $37, but that is not accurate.

It's $3.75 a week for Web and smartphone access only. For Web and tablets it's $5 a week, and for both it's $8.75/wk.

Tablets have web browsers too :)

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#64

Post by lukasm »

criley2 wrote: post #29
lukasm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles.

>"That awkward moment when website you made 20 years ago is better to read articles." Am I the only one who thinks that the whitespace heavy and well designed NYT modern site is better? Good line height, good type choice, very good readability. As opposed to times new roman at 1.0 line height, is that really the pinnacle of readability? Eight grade book report format?

It's a bit of a joke, but yes NY Times does a good job :)

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#65

Post by zitterbewegung »

morgante wrote: post #30

It's pretty impressive how good a job the NYT has done of maintaining historical articles. You can even find quite old articles from key historical times and they're presented just like articles today. For example, the famous Crittenden Compromise is at http://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/06/news/the-crittenden-compro...

Also the BBC seems to have no link rot on their old articles http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#66

Post by dsl »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #65
morgante wrote: post #30

It's pretty impressive how good a job the NYT has done of maintaining historical articles. You can even find quite old articles from key historical times and they're presented just like articles today. For example, the famous Crittenden Compromise is at http://www.nytimes.com/1861/02/06/news/the-crittenden-compro...

Also the BBC seems to have no link rot on their old articles http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm

http://bbcattic.org/

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#67

Post by jrcii »

mattdotc wrote: post #62
jrcii wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how many design, UI and functionality choices would you make differently? I'd start by not hijacking clicks with JavaScript. In Firefox, double clicking the body of the article (which I do often to search for terms in the article) changes the font size (??), clicking in some parts of the body activates a link to another article. It's been like this for years.

Do you have another computer to try that on or perhaps start your browser without add-ons? I use Firefox as my main browser and read nytimes.com every day. I haven't experienced any of those behaviors, nor am I able to replicate them.

I did try this in Firefox's safe mode before posting that comment, and got the same behavior. Could it be a Firefox for Mac thing?

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#68

Post by jlev »

mc32 wrote: post #7

My impression is the mercury news from san jose had an earlier, if paid, presence. Funny how the NYT wanted to charge nearly two dollars to allow you to print older articles. Asking people to pay for the own digitization.

But both were late compared to the first newspaper on the net. The MIT Tech first published on the web in 1993, and on telnet before that. And they have digital archives going back to 1882. http://tech.mit.edu/browse.html

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#69

Post by whorleater »

dsl wrote: post #66
zitterbewegung wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the BBC seems to have no link rot on their old articles http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/736080.stm

http://bbcattic.org/

Sorta amusing that for a site that's meant to back up another site, one of the articles about it's origin story is itself gone from the internet.

Re: The New York Times Introduces a Web Site (1996)

#70

Post by mattkevan »

ergothus wrote: post #50
pkorzeniewski wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you basically didn't give a shit about how the website looks and just focused on the content? Sounds cool :)

I only wish. The marketers were in full force. We'd do "slice and dice" design, where a designer would mock up the full page as single graphic in Photoshop, then we'd slice that image into multiple, and reassemble in tables (no reliable CSS!) with font tags. Today we argue about how much JS is too much, or if there is such a thing, but back then if you wanted the markup to change you sent a request to the backend and…

Oh, good grief. That brings back terrible memories of infinitely nested tables and transparent PNGs. And the font tags. The font tags.
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