It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web • Hacker News Board

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#61

Post by copergi » Fri, Apr 04, 2014, 6:49 PM UTC

jarrett wrote: post #60

copergi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions. People just said "it works on my screen so that's good enough". You don't need to have text fill the entire width of the display to have a site work everywhere, I don't understand why you brought that up at all.

> Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions. What kinds of devices are you referring to? (Remember, we're talking about the days before mobile was a big enough market to justify making mobile versions of websites.) Do you mean Blackberries? I'd humbly submit that, from a business perspective, Blackberry support wasn't an important goal for many sites. Or do…

>What kinds of devices are you referring to?

Everything from monitors to PDAs to laptops of various form factors. Even as late as 2007, 20% of displays seen in web stats were 800x600 or smaller. There were also plenty of devices that could have accessed the web but people didn't bother because the web was so broken with IE 1024 crapsites. The iphone happened in 2007. There was no period where the number of people getting boned by fixed 960px sites was insignificant.

>Remember, we're talking about the days before mobile was a big enough market to justify making mobile versions of websites.

That is begging the question. You can't assume X as a premise to demonstrate X. 20%+ devices were smaller than 960px. It took (and still takes) no extra effort to design a website correctly rather than with a fixed grid. Just as it took no extra effort to design a website correctly rather than for IE only. It is not a co-incidence that "best viewed in IE 5" and "best viewed in 1024x768" buttons were best buds. Both stem from the same source.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#62

Post by jarrett » Fri, Apr 04, 2014, 8:08 PM UTC

copergi wrote: post #61

jarrett wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because we already had tons of different display devices with tons of different sizes and resolutions. What kinds of devices are you referring to? (Remember, we're talking about the days before mobile was a big enough market to justify making mobile versions of websites.) Do you mean Blackberries? I'd humbly submit that, from a business perspective, Blackberry support wasn't an important goal for many sites. Or do…

>What kinds of devices are you referring to? Everything from monitors to PDAs to laptops of various form factors. Even as late as 2007, 20% of displays seen in web stats were 800x600 or smaller. There were also plenty of devices that could have accessed the web but people didn't bother because the web was so broken with IE 1024 crapsites. The iphone happened in 2007. There was no period where the number of people get…

If the 20% figure you gave was accurate for a particular site, then your conclusion would be absolutely correct. That particular site shouldn't have done a fixed-width 960px layout.

However, as someone who was a webmaster in 2007, I can tell you that the 20% figure was not even close to true for my particular sites. Other webmasters I knew told me the same.

So I'd say that this, like all things in web design, admits of no hard-and-fast rule. Rather, the answer is "it depends." In 2007, it depended on what your analytics were telling you. Most sites nowadays have a strong business need to support phone-size displays, but even today, not every single site does.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#63

Post by copergi » Fri, Apr 04, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

jarrett wrote: post #62

copergi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What kinds of devices are you referring to? Everything from monitors to PDAs to laptops of various form factors. Even as late as 2007, 20% of displays seen in web stats were 800x600 or smaller. There were also plenty of devices that could have accessed the web but people didn't bother because the web was so broken with IE 1024 crapsites. The iphone happened in 2007. There was no period where the number of people get…

If the 20% figure you gave was accurate for a particular site, then your conclusion would be absolutely correct. That particular site shouldn't have done a fixed-width 960px layout. However, as someone who was a webmaster in 2007, I can tell you that the 20% figure was not even close to true for my particular sites. Other webmasters I knew told me the same. So I'd say that this, like all things in web design, admits…

>if I make a site that turns off people using low resolutions, I don't get many visitors using low resolutions

This sounds fairly obvious doesn't it?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#64

Post by palakchokshi » Mon, Apr 07, 2014, 9:19 PM UTC

punee wrote: post #58

palakchokshi wrote: post #36

"The design of a solution is much more important than its implementation under the covers, since the latter is almost always invisible to the user and can take on so many different permutations. Whether it’s a simple web page, a data-rich online newspaper, or a full-blown interactive application - how users experience it easily trumps the underlying code used to build it." did you just say that how an application LOO…

Your quotation talks about design, not about looks. Huge difference. Regardless, absolutely NO ONE who uses an application gives a shit about how it is implemented. All people see is the interface. That may include elements that depend on implementation to make it responsive, but what matters is how it looks and feels to the user (i.e. fast). How that is achieved is irrelevant. How it looks isn't "more important", it…

First, a little context goes a long way. Read the article. It talks about design in the context of how things LOOK and feel NOT in the context of programming design/design patterns. Second, Just because someone who uses an application doesn't give a shit about how it is implemented does NOT mean implementation doesn't matter. You can have the slickest interface with the coolest animations but if it's not implemented correctly you can have security leaks, compromised data and in some cases absolutely NOTHING [1] behind your so called "the only thing matters" Interface. [1]http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/04/06/the-1-new-paid-app-i...