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Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

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Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#41

Post by GloriousKoji »

namuol wrote: post #27

(Disclaimer: IANAL - I am not a linguist) The Japanese language itself has very low "information density" - it takes many more syllables to convey the same thing in Japanese than it does in most languages. This is the result of the language having much tighter phonotactic constraints; literally there are fewer "legal" phonemes (and combinations of them) in Japanese than in most other languages. [1] This isn't a criti…

The visual density of Japanese characters has more to do with the fact that it's not a requirement to have white space between words so you can line break mid word. The characters also don't change in size (no real upper or lower case) so everything is pretty mono spaced.

For example look at the wikipedia article for mother in english vs Japanese

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%AF%8D%E8%A6%AA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother

In the English sections with pictures there's significantly more white space between the text and pictures than in the Japanese version.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#42

Post by sirn »

uniqueid wrote: post #21

This is because each font requires thousands of characters to be individually designed which is prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, and would take longer to download. Presumably a coherent hand-designed Japanese font reuses the same style strokes in different combinations. Are there tools to reduce the full set of glyphs to a subset of component elements?

Not really a tool per-se, Japanese has standardized subset of kanji suitable for computer use. This is the JIS X 0208 (Kanji 1 and Kanji 2 containing 6,879 characters) and JIS X 0213 (Kanji 3 and Kanji 4 containing 11,233 characters). There are several tricks font designer can utilizes, such as reusing radicals (component of a kanji) and combine them. This technique only works for certain type of fonts and still requires hand-tuning.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#43

Post by wozer »

huangc10 wrote: post #22

Don't want to light a fire here but I'd like to note that there is inherently something about Japanese culture (or Asian culture for that matter) that inhibits software development growth. Everything in Asia screams of respect for elders. In this case, the elders are the old design patterns and the older programming languages. It's the thought of why do something when it's not broken? As we move forward globally, we…

Not unique to Asia, though. The software situation in Germany feels similar.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#44

Post by ducttapecrown »

nullifidian wrote: post #23

The better question would be why Japan in general maintains its differences/idiosyncrasies from the west? Web design is not the only thing that differs.

Homogeneous island nation! Like 97% of people in Japan are Japanese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#45

Post by crazygringo »

shoreofwonder wrote: post #40
namuol wrote: post #27

(Disclaimer: IANAL - I am not a linguist) The Japanese language itself has very low "information density" - it takes many more syllables to convey the same thing in Japanese than it does in most languages. This is the result of the language having much tighter phonotactic constraints; literally there are fewer "legal" phonemes (and combinations of them) in Japanese than in most other languages. [1] This isn't a criti…

In terms of character count, it takes fewer characters to convey an idea in Japanese than in English. You see this in NES/SNES-era game translations. Both versions of the game had to use the same number of characters. So the level of detail in English is quite low compared to the original. Recently, modders have hacked the English versions of the games to add variable-width fonts to achieve more true translations. Br…

Both are true.

Because each character is equivalent to an entire syllable in English, not a letter.

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#46

Post by lemax »

nullifidian wrote: post #23

The better question would be why Japan in general maintains its differences/idiosyncrasies from the west? Web design is not the only thing that differs.

Until recently Japan had very few foreign nationals, on the order of 1% even in 2005 [1]. Compare that to 10-12% in the US. That has recently been changing as Japan tries to bring in more foreigners to address its shrinking workforce [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Foreign_...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/japan-immigration-polic...

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#47

Post by japgolly »

cambalache wrote: post #37
sizt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kanji is efficient precisely because it is dense.

Yeah, what a weird comment.How can you argue that you need more length and characters when comparing 2000-3000 Kanji vs 26 letters (I am ignoring the "kanas" to simplify the argument) It is like saying Hexadecimal is more verbose than binary.

That's not how Japanese works. Yes Japanese uses Chinese characters that's only a subset of Japanese. Japanese sentences are typically a bit longer than English in terms of syllables and written length - their main reduction technique at the language level is omission, rarely efficiency improvement.

- Why's it so hot today? = 6 syllables

- Nande konna ni atsui no kyou? = 10 syllables (spoken colloquially)

What about written length? You can see the Japanese sentence is a little longer here (when the English uses a non-monospaced font). It's also enough to demonstrates the why using kanji doesn't always provide the huge reduction/compression that you're expecting.

- Why's it so hot today?

- なんでこんなに暑いの今日？

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#48

Post by blackbrokkoli »

I am pretty sure you could write the same article with the roles reversed.

That in itself does of course not take away from the article, but I am catching some negative undertones how Japan is "behind" or "unable to change" because of their society. I guess you could even open the bottomless barell of a discussion about racism, but my point is just this:

Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and prevents true understanding.

Family staffed restaurants which revenues are 90% regulars remake their website and the agency slabs a 4MB hero image on their "landing page". They of course don't need any of that. Only clicks the website gets are people checking the opening times or showing their friends how grass-roots it is. To literally quote the article "Once a precedent has been set for things looking or behaving a certain way then everybody follows it, regardless of whether there is a better solution."

Consider the memes about the weird distorted discolored vector graphics everything tech now has [0]. Consider JIRA managers talking about a 4 second loading target for web pages. We are actually subconsciously aware that "our way" is just as random, weird and wrong, we just like to default to "ours=the way".

Fun article - definitely made me think - but IMO the real takeaway is: The Overton window of design is arbitrary and way more influenced by what $IMPORTANT_PERSON said in 2003 than by logic or sense, and we are not there yet.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/jwsagt/big_te...

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#49

Post by tenryuu »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #18

Let’s hope the rest learn from them and catch up soon. Aside from the security implications of using IE/XP, um, no, how about we don't and let them do what they want? How dare the author maintain that they should follow the West's path of bloated web design practices. Get out of here with that shit.

The article is 7 years old, the technical aspects of this no longer have any valid representation

Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)

#50

Post by SamBam »

canofbars wrote: post #36
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "crammed" design allows for button-function coupling, which makes buttons stateless and predictable.

Yep, When you want FM you can press the FM button rather than press the mode switch an unknown number of times requiring you to watch the display. My car has a rotary selector for air con mode and I usually just turn it all the way to one side and move it the number of clicks I know are needed. That way no looking is required.

I don't think any technology has improved on the decades-old three-dial system for air control in a car.
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