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The unbearable sameness of the modern web

blog.rachelbinx.com

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: The unbearable sameness of the modern web

#51

Most front end devs I manage don't like pre built components and want to roll their own. They might quibble over the behavior or style and feel the itch to change it. This is also a terrible waste of resources to rebuild the wheel over and over. A few components, sure, when there is a compelling case for custom. But you do the business a disservice by consuming so much time on items just because you want to. I also f…

Or heaven forbid, browser-native controls. So many building blocks in a SPA are required because you are not using the browser's native functionality. Instead everything is re-implemented worse.

Re: The unbearable sameness of the modern web

#52

It would be nice if that standardization of UIs at least brought along some benefits for users with screenreaders and the like. But I find that the more we use frameworks, the more we end up complicating the structure of the page for alternative methods of viewing You would expect fully custom UIs made by non-professionals to be the most complicated to parse, but even simple single-page apps with their react-componen…

Funny how using native browser controls is more accessible than re-implementing the controls.

Re: The unbearable sameness of the modern web

#53

I might be going against the narrative, but I enjoy the same-y web. I like having the same design philosophy and navigation on wildly different websites. I like knowing exactly where to find information at a glance because things have been put in roughly the same way across multiple information sources. I don't like to scour through the asinine design decisions of some guy with a handcrafted HTML website that "repres…

There's quite a difference between having a standard layout, and having a standard aesthetic design, though.

I certainly agree that there are many usability patterns that should be implemented in every website. That doesn't mean that every website has to look the same in terms of padding, color design, and content, though.

Re: The unbearable sameness of the modern web

#55
Heaven forbid we have websites with semi standard form factors and layouts so you can actually use them without having to click around randomly for 10 minutes or hope the fancy design doesn’t break your browser.

I have zero desire to bring back the exciting mess of flash websites, vrml, etc etc. it’s bad enough that everything is endless scrolling now.

Re: The unbearable sameness of the modern web

#56
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. Even leas advanced search engines found those sites. Google beat them adding some kind of authority but at the end the authority is gamed. Well content sites giving a s*t to SEO remain under layers and layer of dust.

I think pinning all of this on Google is unfair. They're part of it, but Reddit/Twitter/Facebook is every bit as complicit. Honestly, I think most of what's changed is our collective web-usage habits. In my experience researching ways of building different and better discovery tools, the ice-berg of stuff that you'll virtually never find on Google/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter runs extremely deep, and is often much more in…

Completely agree. I mentioned Google specifically because it in their official mission [1] and this is where they started.

[1] https://about.google/

Re: The unbearable sameness of the modern web

#57
I love the message and the sentiment. It's why I value and enjoy coming across personal websites with effort. The biggest thing I've noticed is that while the adoption and ease of use the various social media websites/platforms, frameworks, boilerplates have brought on there was general decline in computer skills for the general population.

I remember being in school and have computer class where one part of the class was dedicated to setting up a website and learning the ins and outs. I still recall as I left the schooling system the class and activities still survived albeit adapted. Time has passed and things do change but I still see the modern web exactly as it has been if anything discoverability has been the biggest factor of exposure to more uniqueness in the web.

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