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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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351–360 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#351

Post by Pigo »

Brendinooo wrote: post #336

This is nice, but that webfont bullet is a weird take. If you're hosting the font yourself and you're using a modern format, fonts don't add a lot of overhead, and if they happen to fail then the browser will take the next item down the stack. It's textbook progressive enhancement. Nothing about adding a webfont properly will prevent Web content from lasting and being maintained for 10 years. "your focus should be ab…

This definitely reads like something one of my professors would have written. Someone with a lot of good knowledge, but lacking some context for things you learn in the field.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#352

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

tgbugs wrote: post #138

The issues outlined here are one of the reasons that I am moving as many of my workflows to org-mode as possible. Everything is text. Any fancy bits that you need can also be text, and then you tangle and publish to whatever fancy viewing tool comes along in the future. I don't have a workflow for scraping and archiving snapshots of external links, but if someone hasn't already developed one for org I would be very s…

> The issues outlined here are one of the reasons that I am moving as many of my workflows to org-mode as possible. Everything is text.

That works for some, even most people. Unfortunately, the content I create will inevitably cite material in languages other than the main document language. That means that I have to heavily use HTML span lang="XX" tags to set the right language for those passages, so that (among other things) users with screenreaders will get the right output. As far as I know, org-mode lacks the ability to semantically mark up text in this way.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#354

Post by tripzilch »

> I think we've reached the point where html/css is more powerful, and nicer to use than ever before. Instead of starting with a giant template filled with .js includes, it's now okay to just write plain HTML from scratch again.

This is so true, I do it for all my personal webpages. Well I currently have Github Pages in between, but markdown converts to pretty neat vanilla HTML and I wrote the templates myself.

On another note, to his third point, I couldn't access index.20191213.html :)

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#355

Post by tripzilch »

shasheene wrote: post #7

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

Does this also strip the megabytes of superfluous tracking JS? It's probably what'll be the bulk of the size on the modern web, and I don't feel any particular need to store it.

(I believe that for historical purposes, enough complaining about ads and tracking will survive that future historians can easily deduce the existence of this practice)

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#356

Post by strenholme »

account42 wrote: post #319
shapov wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fonts disappearing is not a big issue that will ultimately render your page useless. If the font is gone, the look of the page is slightly affected, but the content of the page remains. It's honestly not a big deal at all.

In that case just use sans-serif or a web-safe font and avoid the third-party dependency.

Here as we enter the 2020s, there are no longer any web safe fonts. Those 1990s Core Fonts for the Web (Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, etc.) are no longer universal across all widely used platforms.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#357

Post by majewsky »

joshspankit wrote: post #340

I would actually shift this quite a bit to say if you’re designing your page to last 10 years, put it on the internet archive on day 1. Invite them to crawl it, verify the crawl was successful, and even talk about that link on your page . It removes the risk of domain hijacking, hosting platforms shuttering, and the author losing interest. P.s. The internet archive is doing excellent work. Support them.

And as you give a content donation, please also consider a monetary donation to keep the lights on at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/donate/

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#358

Post by epicide »

falcolas wrote: post #176
bepvte wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last browser change that broke things like simple news websites????

The phrases "simple" and "news websites" don't combine well these days. Even the NPR website downloads 13.2 MB of content over 91 individual requests, and takes just over 3.6 seconds to load (6.5 to finish). - CSS Stylesheets: 3 - Animated gifs: 1 - Individual JS files: 11 (around 2MB of JS decompressed (but not un-minimized)) - Asynchronous Requests: 14 (and counting) And that's with uBlock Origin blocking 12 differ…

I know NPR was just an example, but they do actually have a text-only version that I've found really useful: https://text.npr.org

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#359

Post by strenholme »

hashmal wrote: post #321
bjoli wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most fonts picked by designers suck. Plain and simple. I override fonts for most websites I frequent.

Can you elaborate on why/how they suck? Do you have example links, to set a common ground for the conversation? I think most fonts that get your attention suck, the best ones are invisible and get you directly to the meaning of text, without getting in the way. So maybe there's a kind of bias (selection or sampling bias?) operating here?

I can’t speak for the parent poster, but, yes, back in the Myspace days, end users would do really tasteless CSS like Comic Sans or an italic font everywhere. Back then, I told my browser “I don’t care what font they tell you to use, just render it with Verdana”.

These days, people either use their social network’s unchangeable CSS, or they use a Wordpress theme with an attractive and perfectly readable font. Even Merriweather, which I personally don’t care for, is easy enough to read.

The only time I have seen a page use obnoxious fonts in the 2010s is when the LibreSSL webpage used Comic Sans as a joke to highlight that the project could use more money:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140422115234/http://www.libres...

Edit It may be a case that the parent poster likes using a delta hinted font, either Verdana or Georgia, on a low resolution monitor, and doesn’t like the blurry look of an anti-aliased font on a 75dpi screen.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#360

Post by majewsky »

thomasz wrote: post #306
JoeSmithson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't put my finger on it but this has a sort of Dickensian quality to me. I think this says something kind of profound about information and capitalism and whatnot.

No, it hasn't. Technology just wasn't there back then which caused significant cost per time unit, which makes it only fair to charge per time unit.

Yeah. In the dialup days, layer 1 and 2 of a home internet connection was a long-running phone call between your own modem and a modem of an ISP. You payed via your phone bill, for the duration of the call.
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