Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

econsultancy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 145 posts

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#111

Post by anigbrowl »

There's money to be made in an open design platform coupled with low-cost curated data feeds. I like being able to customize and tweak how things look on my machine; I loved running Enlightenment on my Linux desktop 10 years ago. And I love and am prepared to pay for good content because I'm a bit of a news addict. But I can't stand the amount of junk on most news websites. Not just adverts - sidebars, useless statistics about which stories are most popular, social buttons, comment dungeons, pictures of journalists, and about ten other varieties of cruft...to say nothing of the poor quality content that I'd like to filter out. I envision something midway between NNTP (the protocol, not the usenet community) and a Bloomberg terminal, but at reasonable cost and with high standards of currency and curation (which is where Wikinews fails currently).

Users choose (and may pay for) the presentation layers that make most sense to them; one person may choose something redolent of newspaper, another person likes their news with Star trek theme, a third inexplicably likes their news delivered by Clippy, the office assistant. Designers offer a wide variety of different presentation and navigation tools to suit the whims of consumers instead of suffocating in an unwinnable race to discover the one format that rules them all from within the bowels of of a media conglomerate; serious journalists get to concentrate on information-gathering, reportage and quality of references, without having to fill an onerous fluff quota ('It's daylight saving time again, and that means rewriting last year's rewrite on daylight saving time!')

grumble grumble get off my lawn etc.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#113

Post by anigbrowl »

Wintamute wrote: post #78

Who are these people that want the web to be some sort of sterile, perfectly conformist, UX's wet dream? Flash is still warm in its grave, and people are already blaming it for crimes that HTML5 hasn't even really made yet. Don't get me wrong, when the function of a website is to perform a task or convert users into paying customers then by all means streamline the crap out of it. The sites that do that well will suc…

I want the web to provide access to a wide variety of information. I would much prefer the option to consume that as I choose, not to have everything gift-wrapped by force. An awful lot of design is a distraction from the content it is supposed to present.

Look, you wouldn't like it if every different document you opened or site you looked at took it upon itself to restyle your desktop and rearrange all your Photoshop preferences to suit the author, would you? Likewise, you don't think that Wikipedia would be improved by allowing every editor to restyle pages in Myspace or Geocities fashion, do you? Of course not, once you've configured or become familiar with a particular environment, consistency supports productivity.

Some of us want to navigate the web for content, without all the branding and UI inconsistencies. I read a variety of specialist web forums, for example, not unlike HN except that they're mostly running PHPbb or something along those lines. They all look different, with different layouts and so on, many of which are UI catastrophes. I would love to just download the semantic information and have a nice consistent UI of my choice that ran on the client side instead of consuming far more bandwidth than the content I am there to read.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#114

Post by peterjmag »

muglug wrote: post #34
dizzystar wrote: post #29

Under the "Contrast Fail" is my single largest pet-peeve of form design. Once you click over that form, the text goes away and you may not know where you are. Please use labels, people. I have no idea why he didn't include that in this article.

This. Unless your form is incredibly simple (e.g. signup or login) you shouldn't just rely on placeholder text. Apple has a nice solution to this issue on their checkout pages - labels placed on top of inputs, only disappearing once text is entered.

I still think inline labels are a bad idea, regardless of placeholder behavior. To quote myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642146

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#115

Post by waylandsmithers »

dkersten wrote: post #108
cscheid wrote: post #5

Aside from this being about design and not HTML5, is anyone else not surprised they didn't include "550 social +1, like, tweet, twat buttons"? Look at that website: there's a social banner, a social footer, a social sidebar, animated gifs for ads. Make that 15 lousy web design trends.

Their "join free" footer at the bottom is a really annoying trend IMHO. It takes up valuable content space and gets in the way. The more intrusive and annoying those popups and bars are, the less likely I am to ever actually join. I guess it must work on other people though, unfortunately...

that's what the firefox nuke anything extension was created for :)

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#116

Post by networked »

jakub_g wrote: post #57
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep wondering: Does anyone actually use these social buttons? The suppliers of said social buttons do; every time you see one while you're logged into FB / G+ / Twitter, a hit of you visiting that site is registered at said parties, and they can all, thanks to the prevalence of these sharing buttons, track your internet usage.

This should be regulated somehow (yeah, I know, I sound like an 19th century guy). But probably lobbyist won't give up on that easily. I have disabled all that crap in my adblock, but there are millions of people who are not that savvy / aware etc. My friend from Germany told me that in some (but not all) the pages, there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them. Try any article at [1]. I…

>there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them

Neat. This looks like a very reasonable way to go if you decide to have social buttons.

Is there a ready-made solution for this?

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#117

Post by networked »

jedahan wrote: post #26
STRML wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe that a site with that kind of traffic & resources hasn't even bothered to concatenate and minify its JS & CSS. Most of the JS files still have comments. Bizarre. They should know better.

I like to think they are trying to preserve the spirit of being able to right click->view source and learn a thing or two. Geocities + view source did spark early interest for myself in coding. Maybe sourcemaps will help with that in the future.

Source maps in JavaScript are a cool idea. More people should know about them [1][2].

[1] See, e.g., http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

[2] ...or http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/source-maps....

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#118

Post by mike-cardwell »

drdaeman wrote: post #87
icebraining wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they use any other tracking system, like ETags[1]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag#Tracking_using_ETags

Disable fetching any third party resources of all sorts, problem solved. Obviously, rulesets should be tuples of (source pattern, resource type, destination pattern), not silly lists ("allow google.com", huh?) like most browser extensions do.

I do this using the RequestPolicy addon for Firefox.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#119

Post by tomkinstinch »

networked wrote: post #116
jakub_g wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be regulated somehow (yeah, I know, I sound like an 19th century guy). But probably lobbyist won't give up on that easily. I have disabled all that crap in my adblock, but there are millions of people who are not that savvy / aware etc. My friend from Germany told me that in some (but not all) the pages, there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them. Try any article at [1]. I…

>there are dummy social buttons loaded by default, you have to "enable" them Neat. This looks like a very reasonable way to go if you decide to have social buttons. Is there a ready-made solution for this?

> Is there a ready-made solution for this?

https://github.com/filamentgroup/SocialCount

I'd be interested in learning about good alternatives.

Re: Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5

#120

Post by yuhong »

damoncali wrote: post #36
grimtrigger wrote: post #2

How are any of these (except maybe the autoplay) due to HTML5?

Replace "HTML5" with "increasing use of facny JavaScript and CSS3". It's just a generalization for the benefit of the semi-technical.

Personally I consider even the buzzword a misnomer: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/07/why-html5-buzzword-is-m...
Post reply on HN