221–230 of 445 posts
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Let's kick it up a notch: What we call unstyled really means that only the browsers default CSS is applied. To me that feels like the design of 1995, NCSA Mosaic, early Netscape and all that. To get rid of that I applied Eric Meyer’s Reset CSS 2.0, it looks like this: http://img.weinzierlweb.com/wordsr.gif
Although 1995 would have had a grey background.
"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 about a story (not just words) and those can be told through a variety of mediums, but in this case, the author used words.
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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.
Still needed style. The good point is, we don't need to be extremist.
http://weinzierlweb.com/words.txt
ASCII text, copied from Firefox, added links and emphasis manually and formatted with par in vim.
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 point is that people have, at times, become a bit too obsessed with style, interactivity, pictures, colors, fonts, video, audio, etc. Sometimes, you just need to focus on the content. If a minimal stylesheet helps with that (just keeping a reasonable column width, and reasonable font size, to make the text readable), that doesn't really affect that message at all.
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Still an order of magnitude faster than Reddit. Maybe I'm just a noob at programming and scaling, but after all the engineers Reddit hires, how are they still so slow and crashing?
Isn't the Reddit team still pretty small. I think they do pretty well for the amount of traffic to engineers ratio.
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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.
Before Gutenberg et al, you had to have someone spend weeks or months to hand copy your book, one at a time. To me, the web is just the next step in the improvement in the publishing of the written word. I don't see it as different than a book.
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 seeing and using, and many people could do that. It was like looking into the darkness and suddenly seeing a firefly blinking :-)
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My point here is, the printing press had it's impact, nobody denies that. Seeing the times changing is what leaved ChuckMcM's in-laws astounded.
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Then style the web as you fit on your own browser, but don't try to impose your design sensibilities on mine. That's why I keep saying 'client side'. I prefer not to download and process most of the graphic cruft that I see, and vastly prefer reading articles in an RSS reader to visitng pages that remind me of being a shopping mall.
You are already able to do this; simply disable stylesheets or as you said use a reader app. We've already discussed using technology like adblocker. Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own. I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is…
I have the skills and experience to retool my browsing experience for my more minimalist aesthetic, but most consumers experience the web as something more like an animated version of a supermarket checkout magazine. Since getting a smartphone a few years back, I've been especially struck by how much bandwidth is consumed on transmitting cruft on things like news stories, where the actual text is only a few kilobytes and relevant photographs take up no more than a few hundred kb; but after you pile on all the trackers, divs, ads, etc. etc. the page ends up being many megabytes and can easily take 30 seconds over a typical 3g connection.
To me that's enormously consumer-hostile to very little real publisher benefit; the more shit I have to download to see a page the less likely I am to consume news from that source and the more likely I am to reinforce my ad blockers etc. (whereas I will make exceptions for site that make restrained use of such things so they can get a little extra ad revenue or tracking data value in return for the service they provide).
All of the elements I just described are made up of words and/or represent words.
Sure designers can lose their way and become engrossed in decorating elements (which in some cases becomes a USP), but that's not typically the end goal.
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.
[1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)