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This is a web page

justinjackson.ca

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Re: This is a web page

#421

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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…

So, the web back then is what Wikipedia is today?

Re: This is a web page

#422

Post by dredmorbius »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #421
petercooper wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, the web back then is what Wikipedia is today?

That's not a bad characterization.

Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another.

What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.

Re: This is a web page

#423

Post by dredmorbius »

minikites wrote: post #14

Reminded me of This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself mixed with Web Design is 95% Typography http://consc.net/misc/moser.html http://ia.net/blog/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period

This is a sentence. That fragments. Useful.

One of my favorite of Hofstadter's essays. And thanks for your links.

Re: This is a web page

#424

Post by dredmorbius »

visarga wrote: post #312
euxneks wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah.. web rings.. I remember babylon 5 web rings... Nostalgia's a hell of a thing.

If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search. By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk abo…

Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.

Re: This is a web page

#425

Post by exodust »

sorry, but words on a web page isn't "magic".

> "We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things."

When we didn't have those fancy things, we wanted them. If they were taken away, we'd want them back. Nothing wrong with fancy presentation if your intention is to present something.

The first thing I ever did on the internet back in the 90s was look up guitar tab for beginners. I skipped the words and printed out the guitar tabs I found.

The author of "this is a web page" is flogging a book. That's nice, but I don't really think that reading his words is "magical".

Oxygen is magical. Gravity is magical. Magic is everywhere. Can we please move on to the magical things that actually stand out as deserving such a label relative to where we are in online evolution?

The internet of things is settling in nicely, and it isn't about words, it's about things. Linking data and real-time manipulation from online to things in our immediate and remote environments. THAT is closer to magic than plain text on a white page.

Re: This is a web page

#426

Post by kyrias »

vorporeal wrote: post #182
bitwize wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I'd say that text is not only the heart and soul of the web, but also of motherfucking civilization . Animation and video are nice, and great adjuncts to text. But language is still the most common and easy way to store and share information intended to be consumed by humans, and since…

Drawings are the heart and soul of civilization. For one, they originated ~37 thousand years before the first written language. Second, understanding text requires knowing how the information it contains is encoded (what language it is written in). Drawings are far more universal.

  > Second, understanding text requires knowing how the 
  > information it contains is encoded (what language it
  > is written in). Drawings are far more universal.
So you're saying that you can look at those old drawings and understand what they mean?

Re: This is a web page

#427

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

dredmorbius wrote: post #424
visarga wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search. By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk abo…

Search was actually anticipated (along with social graphs) by TBL in his first WWW proposal documents, posted to HN a few months back.

It was anticipated in the protocol, that's what ? is for.

Re: This is a web page

#428

Post by iso8859-1 »

calinet6 wrote: post #270
tl wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the full stylesheet: body { font-size:18px; } .wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin:0 auto; } I feel like you're being a little unfair here.

That's quite beautiful for such a small stylesheet. I once almost started a web site called SimpleStyleSheets that had that goal -- maximum of 4 lines of CSS, no ugly compression, maximum of 120 characters per line. And see how good you can make a page of simple semantic content look. I should do it now -- it'd be a good exercise in this day of complex designs and bloated styles.

Beautiful? It's a tragicomedy! Even the most minimal stylesheet shows how unintuitive CSS is: To center content, your don't use the word "center"!

Re: This is a web page

#429

Post by iso8859-1 »

freejack wrote: post #287

Nice, except it needs a "like" button.

Why does it need a like button? You can like every webpage! Just use a "like" bookmark.

Let's assume every webpage is made to be liked (I'm an optimist). Hopefully you see the madness of like buttons now.

Re: This is a web page

#430

Post by iso8859-1 »

tericho wrote: post #328

While I do agree that copy is an important and valid starting point, don't dismiss the power of images either. This[1] is a very important and meaningful symbol in any language. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/A14...

Just because it's a symbol doesn't mean it's an image:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/26a0/index.htm

Related: In my head, webpages should visually only consist of vector graphics and photographs. You can put JPEG's in SVG's, so there is no reason to rasterize hybrids.

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