Why is it that every other post that has to do with design has some weird graphical choices in it? I am talking about the bright yellow background.
Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
161–170 of 473 posts
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have this with spelling. Even a fractional glance at a poster/billboard/sign, without focusing my eyes on it, and certainly without reading a single word ... any misspelled word triggers a flag in my brain sort of "pinging" me with the precise location of the misspelled word.
The grocer's apostrophe (which I will argue should be called the grocers'(1) apostrophe, since there are many offending grocers) is the bane of my existence (1) My phone absolutely tried to correct that back to "grocer's"
If you want to make your existence slightly more irritating: Learn German and move to Germany. There the possessive s ending is written without an apostrophe - but there is an equivalent which then falsely writes the possessive with an apostrophe - the so-called Deppenapostroph (idiot's apostrophe).
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#163Don't read this article, if you are not in web dev. Once you start seeing it, you can't stop seeing it, and it will drive you crazy forever. It is the same for noticing misalignment, recognizing color oversaturation, high quality speakers/headphones, etc. (It is a good article!)
motherfuckingwebsite.com is centered alright to the whole width of the browser windows right in the middle of the browser window.
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have this with spelling. Even a fractional glance at a poster/billboard/sign, without focusing my eyes on it, and certainly without reading a single word ... any misspelled word triggers a flag in my brain sort of "pinging" me with the precise location of the misspelled word.
The grocer's apostrophe (which I will argue should be called the grocers'(1) apostrophe, since there are many offending grocers) is the bane of my existence (1) My phone absolutely tried to correct that back to "grocer's"
> which I will argue should be called
I think you're missing the joke of the name!
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same happens when you: - Install flooring - Install trim in your own home - Build / install cabinets You will now see: - Odd flooring patterns and uneven floors - Know what it looks like when trim isn't coped - Uneven gaps between doors
I’m not entirely sure I agree with you on this. It’s hard for me to say because I really like the imperfections in things I build, for the most part. Like I’ll full spartle a wall (not entirely sure if this is the correct English description) and I’ll intentionally leave the finish less than “perfect” because I think it adds a little soul to it that will make me happy down the years. Then you have things like floorin…
> I think it adds a little soul to it that will make me happy down the years.
The word for this is wabi-sabi.
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#166~20 years ago I was building websites and I would spent hours to make things "perfectly" arranged on them. I hate it when it's not the way it was supposed to be. Pixel perfect or nothing. And then I just stopped with web and moved on with my life. It's time consuming, buggy and while it worked in one browser it didn't work in another. Screw that.
Why would you want to make things pixel perfect? Why not work with the flexibility of the web instead?
because sometimes one missing pixel makes everything look awful:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11419541/how-can-i-get-r...
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same happens when you: - Install flooring - Install trim in your own home - Build / install cabinets You will now see: - Odd flooring patterns and uneven floors - Know what it looks like when trim isn't coped - Uneven gaps between doors
I’ve noticed these things all my life. Even as a young child I would point such things out and others would have trouble seeing it. Once I was diagnosed with autism, this tendency of mine made a lot more sense. I’m curious if other people detect interrupted or irregular patterns so readily. It’s like there’s a part of my brain just looking for anomalies and I can’t turn it off.
Is that autism thing? My therapist suspect I'm autistic, and I have always noticed things like this - or trying to align everything in my mind when I look at things, or trying to split the into two halves of equal volume.
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man... whole generations just straight up either do not realize, or have forgotten that early CSS revolved around creating documents, not apps, and that all of those design paradigms originated from typesetting. In the same way that one would float a figure to the left or right of lines of a paragraph, `float: left;` and `float: right;` allowed you to do the same. Open a textbook and look at lines of a paragraph flow…
Everyone realises that. They just understand that it is a big problem with CSS. People wanted app-like layouts since before CSS was a thing. The problem is the people who designed CSS had an ideological axe to grind. They believed that HTML should only be used for document layout.
But that is the fundamental problem behind all of web nowadays: It was initially designed for documents; there are precursors for this entire HTML stuff (hypercards and similar things). Funnily enough, there existed tech even back then that was much much better at dealing with actual applications and their requirements. Unfortunately, many stupid idiots decided to use the "web" for that instead and mangle something aimed at documents to hell and back to actually do apps with it. The amount of time (of humans) and resources (not humans, but computing power, energy, ...) wasted on creating and running kludge after kludge to coerce the "web" into "something for apps" is absolute insanity.
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before CSS people used to use tables, often nested, for all kinds of layout. Eg if your page had a header, a sidebar and a main text area, you would create a table with cells of the right relative widths, with invisible borders, and put each layout element in one possibly merged cell. This was essentially standard practice for a while. CSS allowed layouts like this to be done without tables. It still supported tables…
And then it took some 20-ish years for CSS to finally realize that aligning to a grid is a good idea and, through a long, painful, incremental process, eventually reinvent tables for layout.
I mean, semantics are also good! Yes, CSS grids are a lot like tables in some ways, but not having to add 25% more DOM elements to fake a table layout (display: table/table-row/table-cell; that's 3 divs for one row!) is also a thing to be celebrated. Plus, in practice, grid is a lot more powerful than doing a few common layouts. Grid took so long precisely because they were trying to think a little further ahead rather than just pushing something out into the world and hoping it works out. Thankfully web standards have matured and are more careful not to repeat mistakes like the debacle that was CSS property prefixes.
Re: Hardest problem in computer science: centering things
#170But is it really worth fixing these things? What do you achieve by spending time and money to fix these details, other than making users slightly less annoyed by your design? Maybe these details are not fixed because they don’t really matter that much. Have you ever stopped using an app because a button or icon was slightly misaligned?
It doesn't give me much confidence in the company's seriousness about quality. When I see these kinds of things in applications, my mind starts thinking, "OK, I wonder what else they half-assed?" Does the main functionality really work? If they can't even notice problems that you can literally see with your eyes , what important invisible things are broken, too? Should I really fork over hard-earned money for the pre…
I dunno. I found out that people who do care about how things look like, tend not to care about how they work and whether they are practical. And the other way round too. The slightly misaligned button is not "basic shit". It is useless shit.
And this works on company level too. The groups that spend a lot of time caring about visuals tend not to give a damm about much else.