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How the Web Became Unreadable

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Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#21

Post by throwawayReply »

amelius wrote: post #20
throwawayReply wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't require strong AI, firefox reader view achieves that without strong AI. It even preserves article images nicely.

Reader view isn't perfect yet, which is probably why (useful as it is) most people don't use it. Also, as more readers use it, the ad industry will try to circumvent it, e.g, by tricks like turning part of the text into images, et cetera. Eventually, you will probably be better off by OCR'ing the rendered webpage (i.e., as the user sees it), and using AI to only keep the relevant text and images.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

It's not perfect so people don't use it?

No, people don't use it because it has poor discover-ability and it isn't in other browsers, further reducing discover-ability.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#22

Post by dredmorbius »

Bartweiss wrote: post #16

Subjective though it may be, there are a lot of people who find black-on-white unpleasant to look at. I greatly prefer sites that don't use it, regardless of what they do with font and size. This could just be a case of conflicting preferences, but I don't think it has to be. Clear contrasts are achievable without insisting on #000/#FFF web design. - The most obvious improvement is simply keeping an eye on contrast.…

Shifting the background colour, slightly, tends to be vastly more readable than screwing with the foreground colour:

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB/

It also far more closely approaches the appearance of print on somewhat aged paper:

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/5...

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#23

Post by dredmorbius »

amelius wrote: post #6

We need some strong AI to strip away the ads, and extract only the main text, then format that text using the reader's preferences. OCR 2.0, if you will. Caveat: it may kill the advertisement industry.

The FYWD browser:

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/ubkidr7yuc7azg9hdnl7lq

The premise: A web browser aimed at information presentation, largely textual. It will offer a standardised format, non-Javascript, uniformly presented readable Web page, not intended for apps, but a sane set of presentation defaults for a given site.

Site-offered CSS would be ignored (or at best strongly deprecated). Straight-bog HgsML 1, 2, / HTML5 sites would render best. User could opt for specific client-side stylesheets, e.g., night mode, large/small font, etc.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#24

Post by blowski »

I'd like to see some evidence that today's sites are less readable than those that went before us. Otherwise, it just looks like nostalgia for the 'good old days'.

Well I remember the 90s when we there were plenty of unreadable sites, ugly monstrosities with unreadable typography and garish colour schemes. Meanwhile, much of the web is now dominated by sites like Facebook, Google, BBC, etc - all of which are extremely readable.

Both then and now, the reason for the bad sites is that they are made by amateurs. They're the same people that make those terrible leaflets with 20 fonts and loads of clipart. Just because they exist, it doesn't mean the web is getting worse. My anecdotal experience is that it's improving.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#25

Post by grive »

tdb7893 wrote: post #9
amelius wrote: post #6

We need some strong AI to strip away the ads, and extract only the main text, then format that text using the reader's preferences. OCR 2.0, if you will. Caveat: it may kill the advertisement industry.

killing the ad industry means killing the current web unless there is another revenue stream

That's a good thing.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#26

Post by ThomPete »

blowski wrote: post #24

I'd like to see some evidence that today's sites are less readable than those that went before us. Otherwise, it just looks like nostalgia for the 'good old days'. Well I remember the 90s when we there were plenty of unreadable sites, ugly monstrosities with unreadable typography and garish colour schemes. Meanwhile, much of the web is now dominated by sites like Facebook, Google, BBC, etc - all of which are extremel…

Actually they weren't unreadable they were just ugly :)

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#27

Post by mercurysmessage »

ThomPete wrote: post #7

It’s true that many designers tend to look at text more like a texture. Instead of making it large and distinct they will make it small and light colored when it's in fact the only valuable thing on the screen. It's an unfortunate consequence of so much design today going minimal and more typographic, which makes it's hard to differentiate elements any other way than to start evening out the contrast. If everything t…

I'm assuming that by retina screen you simply mean high resolution? Because Retina display is just the apple term for a high resolution screen.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#28

Post by dredmorbius »

tdb7893 wrote: post #9
amelius wrote: post #6

We need some strong AI to strip away the ads, and extract only the main text, then format that text using the reader's preferences. OCR 2.0, if you will. Caveat: it may kill the advertisement industry.

killing the ad industry means killing the current web unless there is another revenue stream

Information as a public good, financed by an income / wealth indexed content tax, pro-rated to content authors, and/or basic income.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

Rationale for information as a public good:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...

And from Hal Varian (UC Berkeley / Google):

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.h...

Why micropayments (even with repudiation) won't work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...

The problem with advertising-financed publishing (from 1909):

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/0...

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#29

Post by amelius »

throwawayReply wrote: post #21
amelius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reader view isn't perfect yet, which is probably why (useful as it is) most people don't use it. Also, as more readers use it, the ad industry will try to circumvent it, e.g, by tricks like turning part of the text into images, et cetera. Eventually, you will probably be better off by OCR'ing the rendered webpage (i.e., as the user sees it), and using AI to only keep the relevant text and images.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. It's not perfect so people don't use it? No, people don't use it because it has poor discover-ability and it isn't in other browsers, further reducing discover-ability.

> It's not perfect so people don't use it?

Unfortunately, I think this is the case. Look at DuckDuckGo. It works for 90% of searches, but for that last 10% you really need Google. As a result, people use Google for all their searches.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#30

Post by dingo_bat »

sliverstorm wrote: post #19
dingo_bat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that so? My experience says otherwise. For example, hn will stay, and so will the linked blog. They don't show ads.

HN is a meta-site. Without ads, there will be dramatically less content to link to.

I marked all the stories that I think are not dependent on ads: https://sli.mg/ztY27D

18 out of the 30 stories on the first page do not depend on ads. That's good enough for me, even though many interesting things are lost.

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