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This is a web page

justinjackson.ca

181–190 of 445 posts

Re: This is a web page

#181

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…

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.

I don't know about the OP, but in 1994, I was mostly using Webcrawler as my search engine. Lycos came out around then too. Switched to Altavista pretty quickly after it came out.

Re: This is a web page

#182

"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…

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.

Re: This is a web page

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it looks as if the colour is just a background-color attribute in CSS, which changes on mouseover. If so, it should be white->transparent anti-aliased in the RK image, which is looks like it's trying to be. Vector, e.g. drawn with Canvas, would be better (e.g. with a fallback to a single colour png.)

It was trying to be, and failing. I am currently serving up a ( antialiasing fixed ) png, and @2x png for hdpi displays. Do you think a canvas logo would provide any additional benefit above these two?

If there was an error in the original anti aliasing that's now fixed, that should be fine - I was speculating how to get a vector version up and running (I am sure there are vector image formats, but all the web-friendly ones I've found turn out to be bitmap underneath.)

(just checked, after refreshing my cache a few times, and it looks much better now, nice one.)

Re: This is a web page

#184

Centered text, large white borders, and larger than standard font size are all design. Minimal design, but it does feel very different if you look at it completely unstyled: http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.

I like your version even better. ;)

The point of the post wasn't: "un-style everything!"

The point was that simple, unadorned words on a page can be powerful and effective.

Re: This is a web page

#185
post #177

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…

Just being cynical here, but books written by people from far away places have circulated for a lot longer than the internet has been around.

Not just anybody. You had to have a publisher, and it took weeks to years to get a piece published. Which means nothing got published if there wasn't a chance at a monetary return. The web is a significant improvement if you ask me.

Re: This is a web page

#186
Something that struck me with an unexpected amount of force was a recent scene in Game of Thrones where one of the characters is explaining to another (sheltered) character that he knew the location of a secret passage because he had read about it in a book.

The sheltered character was astounded that he looked at squiggles on a page, and through which was able to know something about the world. "Wizardry", was I think the word used.

But when you break communication down to what it is, ideas and knowledge abstracted so they can be externalized, it's pretty fucking amazing.

Re: This is a web page

#187

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…

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.

I didn't have a computer at the time, but my friends who were online all used AOL, which came with its own search engine, chat rooms, email, etc.

Re: This is a web page

#188

Centered text, large white borders, and larger than standard font size are all design. Minimal design, but it does feel very different if you look at it completely unstyled: http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.

!!

Oh wow he actually DID write that in a little city in British Columbia. I assumed he was pulling metadata and serving people different answers.

Re: This is a web page

#189
post #174

After sitting on the setup of my blog for a good nine months -- trying out several static site generators, experimenting with different color schemes, reactive layouts, font sizes, font families, deployment scripts, and composing about 15 stubs for posts and not finishing a single one -- i have accomplished less than this.

I had a perfectly usable blog built in laravel 3 with a content manager, hosted comments, the works -- but I destroyed it because one day I decided everything had to be turned into modules, and then one day everything had to be statically cached, and the switching the css framework from bootstrap to skeleton then back to bootstrap, then I built a custom static-page generating php framework, then I realized what an awful idea that was (although it's what my site is running now, minus a blog and anything interesting), and now I'm trying to port my laravel 3 stuff over to 4.

Just dumping textfiles into an open directory honestly would've been more productive (if less fun.)

Re: This is a web page

#190

Centered text, large white borders, and larger than standard font size are all design. Minimal design, but it does feel very different if you look at it completely unstyled: http://i.imgur.com/xOWPr8E.png I feel like it subverts the message a bit that he still felt the need to style things.

The OP doesn't argue against styling. It argues against design cruft. The point is not to forgo design, but to focus on design that enhances content.
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