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This is a web page

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Re: This is a web page

#121

Post by exizt88 »

adventured wrote: post #76
weixiyen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

change "words" to "content".

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…

> That's why 3/4 of all the posts on Reddit's home page are links to imgur

They still have titles. And many of those posts are memes that have words in them.

Re: This is a web page

#122

Post by derleth »

koshak wrote: post #117
mixedbit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, yesterday there was a discussion on HN of Steve Jobs remark that his legacy won't survive long, because technology quickly becomes obsolete: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5906202 Words have much better chance of survival than other elements of web design. What was considered a decent design 10+ years ago, is today often laughable.

not technology but tool. apple // was tool. It is obsolete. Netscape was a tool. Obsolete. Is TCP/IP obsolete? The trend of today is sticky headers. Tomorrow it will look rediculuous. Is it tech? No. It's the matter of fashion.

Technology is tools.

Re: This is a web page

#123

Post by adventured »

zanny wrote: post #113
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…

In defense of words, hyper text markup language has a lot of tags for words (more than I could count on two hands) vs two hands worth for images, pictures, video, etc combined. Throw in CSS (which makes words pretty) and you have a lot of stuff to do with words, and not that much to do with arrays of pixels or sine waves.

Ok, but I'm not sure how the quantity of tags determines the value of the content contained.

I can vary a graphic element or photo a near infinite number of ways prior to inserting it via one tag. I wouldn't say that argues in favor of imagery over text, or vice versa, however.

Re: This is a web page

#124

Post by tenpoundhammer »

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 meat-- and then building everything else around that.

Re: This is a web page

#125

Post by adventured »

epo wrote: post #119
adventured wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone can communicate in words? That isn't true, unfortunately. I don't see why you even said that, only to negate it at the bottom. More people can digest a photo than can read a specific language, by a radical margin.

All of your contributions seem to denote someone who doesn't really have anything worthwhile to convey in writing. Try to communicate "Hire me, I'm experienced." in a photo. Share that on Facebook.

If you're going to attempt to insult me personally (instead of focusing on the content of my posts), in words, I'd prefer that you put in more effort if we're talking about things that are worthwhile.

Re: This is a web page

#126

Post by [deleted] »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #58
ignostic wrote: post #37

Sure, simple text is fine for a blog. But if I'm selling something like a piece of art it's all about the images: large, high-quality images from multiple angles. Pinterest wouldn't be called minimalist, but it does a damn fine job of accomplishing its goals. Design should help accomplish business (or personal) goals. We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma.

I think the author clearly states: "Think about the words first, than the rest". I didn't read it as a call to minimalism, more so as "It does not matter how flashy your site is, if in the end you have really nothing to say." It's hard to disagree, honestly (it's also plain common sense, nothing groundbreaking, although the minimalist presentation really helps driving home the point).

[deleted]

Re: This is a web page

#127

Post by cia_plant »

Just a note on the text style: it all seems kind of overemphasized and breathless, due to the heavy use of bold, italic, short sentences, one-sentence paragraphs, and so on.

Less is more with such devices, especially bold text. I'm not a skimmer by nature, but when a post is full of bold text I find myself involuntarily skimming the bolded parts, because they have such a higher visual weight than the rest of the text. It's almost as though those words are shouted, and it becomes harder to hear the rest of the text.

Simply paying close attention to the flow of your writing can usually give a sufficient sense of emphasis without resorting to special formatting.

Re: This is a web page

#128

Post by dreen »

monkeyspaw wrote: post #57
dreen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made me look - the front page of HN is currently 7.8KB, and this is: - 1.6% of yahoo.com size (477KB) - 18.9% of reddit.com size (41.2 KB) - 23.6% of stackoverflow.com size (33KB) and - 108.3% of gmail.com size (7.2KB) - 520% of google.com size (1.5KB) - 866.6% of your blog post size (908B) so this gives some perspective. edit: the most surprising is gmail.com for me, id have thought they load tons of js in the ba…

How did you do these measurements? I would be shocked if the entire gmail webapp is 7.2KB. Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.

Same as you, even on disabled cache its about the same, thats why I was surprised.

edit: OK so in Incognito Mode i got 17KB which is a bit more believable, but why doesnt it show that in normal mode with disabled cache?

Re: This is a web page

#129

Post by pdpi »

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…

> I see no great argument in favour of words being the core over any other form of expression.

I think the article zooms in on text for "shock value", if you will, but there's a deeper point.

I trust you're not on Hacker News because of the aesthetically pleasing orange bar at the top of the page, you're here for the news, and the discussion. And that's what the article is getting at.

We get so wrapped up in the tech stack powering our websites, and oh so elaborate presentation layers, that we sometimes forget that what truly, really matters is the content encased in all that.

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