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This is a web page

justinjackson.ca

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Re: This is a web page

#251

Post by euxneks »

adventured wrote: post #69

"At it's heart, web design should be about words." No. The web is not just a place for text / words, that is not its heart and soul, and therefore neither is that the case for web design. It really never has been. I see no great argument in favor of words being the core over any other form of expression. Today's bandwidth more than allows for beautiful video, animation, high quality graphics and photos, etc. Or low k…

Agreed. The internet is essentially about information. Words are a subset of information transmission. What we can take away from this page though, is that information should not be obstructed by cruft. I agree with that.

Re: This is a web page

#252

Post by threedaymonk »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #80

I love it. Even seeing Times/Times New Roman in use brings back a tinge of nostalgia. I like sites with some design pizazz, but a simple page like this with well-written content trumps most over-designed, over-widgetized crap sites any day.

It's only Times [New Roman] because that's what your browser is set to use by default.

Imagine: a world in which you could choose your preferred font for reading websites! Sure, most people would choose Comic Sans, but that would be better than making people download some super-thin font that looks great on (and only on) the designer's Retina display.

Re: This is a web page

#253

Post by mijustin »

tenpoundhammer wrote: post #124

I can't speak for the author,but what I can say what I got out of this. This article spoke to the idea that we often start our endeavours in the wrong place. We start off trying to find the flashy angle and trying to hit all the write aesthetic notes before we even know what we are trying to communicate. We should start our process by making a clear and distinct communication and filling our sites with content --the…

Yes; that's it exactly!

Re: This is a web page

#254

Post by Torgo »

bcRIPster wrote: post #234
simpleglider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996. The mother…

I remember circa-1994/1995, our library got a book called something like "World Wide Web Yellow Pages" and it was a printed book of a couple hundred pages of curated web URLs. Even then the irony was not lost on me. Why didn't they just put it online? The answer was, well, then how would you find that?

Re: This is a web page

#255

Post by kmfrk »

flaktrak wrote: post #246
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil. I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil , had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now se…

One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?

I feel like such a hipster for having used AltaVista and Dogpile as search engines.

Re: This is a web page

#256

Post by nhamann »

I had an insight a few months back when I was looking at djb's website (http://cr.yp.to/djb.html). I was spending far too much time playing with toys (static site generators) and not enough time actually producing interesting content. Nobody cares about your pretty blog theme, they care about your ideas.

Re: This is a web page

#257

Post by falcolas »

mijustin wrote: post #238
adventured wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. That isn't what the person said. Their entire post was built around stripping down web design to the words. In fact, the author was very precise in the usage of the term "words." This for example: "But the most powerful tool on the web is still words." That blatantly is not the case in my opinion. Photos are vastly more powerful than words on today's web. That's why 3/4 of all the posts on Reddit's…

OP here. My point wasn't that we should remove all other types of media from the web. (I love other types of media) My point was that the most powerful tool on the web is still words. Here's why: 1. Words are an excellent starting point. All you need is a text editor. Words are a great way to express ideas in a concrete way. Words can stand on their own. 2. It's easy to add things to words. Adding an image, video, or…

I would go one step further, and say that while images are very popular on the internet, most are light on meaning.

The parent mentions the some large percentage of the links are to imgur, which is absolutely true. However, the actual content of those images is so shallow they could each be summed up in a sentence apiece; ironically enough, looking at the front page this very instant, half of the images contain words to convey a specific message, and the rest rely on the title of the post to convey context to the image.

The right picture may be worth a thousand words, but much to my dismay there are very few pictures of that quality to be found.

Re: This is a web page

#258

Post by Nate75Sanders »

petercooper wrote: post #239
simpleglider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…

Seconded.

Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics.

I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.

Re: This is a web page

#259

Post by gbog »

kmfrk wrote: post #255
flaktrak wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?

I feel like such a hipster for having used AltaVista and Dogpile as search engines.

And Astalavista.

Re: This is a web page

#260

Post by joe24pack »

kmfrk wrote: post #255
flaktrak wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?

I feel like such a hipster for having used AltaVista and Dogpile as search engines.

Hipster huh? Well what about Lycos, remember that search engine?
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