Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why?
To filter out idiots and the lazy. 'Normies'.
Here is where I consider myself a segregationist. Give them their web: Facebook, YouTube, Google, et al. -- leave me out of normie net.
Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
121–130 of 213 posts
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#122I 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 pr…
> Seeing "them" as "behind" is a bad way to think about it and prevents true understanding. So I guess still using Fax Machines to do business in 2020 is not "behind", it's just "different" right? Let's call a cat a cat when we see one.
Throughout the world it is often the case that early adopters of a technology build so much infrastructure around it that their cost of switching becomes much higher.
Another case in point: The US just can't move away from credit cards and slow freight trains and cars, all due to infrastructure issues, while countries that have been historically behind have been able to jump ahead to mobile payments and high speed rail.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Japanese native who's fluent in English, I disagree with this. I regularly translate English (mostly technical) texts to Japanese, and the translation I get is roughly the same size as the original. Its density is certainly not "very low". The reason that you might think that Japanese is more "bloated" is probably because the form of the language you hear most - in TV news and speeches - are in the "polite" form…
I am completely ignorant here--how common is the polite form on websites?
It's complicated, but perhaps a good comparison is newspaper headlines in the West: headings and phrases etc are compact without ever being slangy.
For example, a random ad on the Yahoo Japan homepage proclaims 予約来場いただくと進呈QUOカード５０００円分, which means "get a 5000 yen gift card if you come visit", but uses literary words like 来場 (arrival/visit) and 進呈 (gift) that would rarely be used in spoken Japanese, and even the polite いただく (to humbly receive) is in the short "dictionary" form instead of being conjugated out the way it would be in speech.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#124This 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?
Even if you don't go down to the individual stroke level you can break kanji up into a set of radicals. If you mix that up with the katakana, hiragana, roman letters, and punctuation it's maybe something like 500 characters. Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further.
> Given the affluence of emoji's and various Unicode symbols these days it weakens that argument even further.
Most of the time these symbols and emoji are using fallback font though. It's not included in every font.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#125Rakuten is the original Japanese Amazon. It has everything and is just as cluttered as Amazon. Pages are optimized for maximum spam. Might as well call it the spam UI paradigm.
Here are sites that don't spam.
https://www.playstation.com/ja-jp/
And here is a web design aggregator. Here you can see more of the Japanese aesthetic at work.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see you’re being downvoted but as someone who lives in Japan and had the misfortune to agree to doing a survey this week on tourism which entailed my looking at around 57 tourist websites that made me viscerally angry at how bad they were, I can say you’re right on the money. To say so is not racism or any such thing other than the ability to correctly describe a situation.
Stating the differences, especially the poor quality of the websites is normal. There’s a bunch of terrible web developers here, and they get paid to make terrible websites. The racism starts whenever a foreigner starts explaining Japanese culture, and they will usually incorporate some old fashioned Japanese nationalism. Japanese people are just people. There is nothing inherent to our culture, genetics, or soil tha…
You have to understand, Japan is an individualist country, unlike collectivist American culture. For example, in the US, there are large hospitals, because we expect to be treated together, but Japan has small clinics due to its individualism. Similarly, in the US, we build large highways for everyone with street signs and house addresses, but in individualist Japan, you have to navigate the subway alone through neighborhoods with no street names. Finally, the article shows that US websites are aimed at a collective culture, but Japan aims small websites geared towards ease of creation: collective readership be damned.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#127Don'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…
USA just elected an ancient President and an ancient Speaker of the House, but we don’t respect them, so it’s not a Confucian country.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think Japanese websites are better They are only better if you never use them.
The few Japanese websites I've used have been superior to their American equivalents. Kotobank is definitely a lot more pleasing to the eyes than Webster's.
Seems like every knock off search engine/content farm site.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#129Not to mention, storing credit card details in plaintext.
Re: Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
#130This might be coming from my very short exposure to japanese culture. But can some explain how come it seems like japanese stylistic choices come down to two extreme opposites? either very minimalistic or extreme Insanity (or at least that's how my brain registers it :)