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This is a web page

justinjackson.ca

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Re: This is a web page

#261

Post by teh_klev »

kmfrk wrote: post #255
flaktrak wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?

I feel like such a hipster for having used AltaVista and Dogpile as search engines.

What is hipster about that? Your statement makes no sense.

I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"?

That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars.

If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster" than using Altavista. Gawd, I musta been and early hipster, how much more "hipster" can you get than that.

Re: This is a web page

#262

Post by adriand »

CodeMage wrote: post #176
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…

And yet you chose to present your ideas using words. At the heart of the Web is the communication between humans. At the heart of that communication are words. You can argue that we can communicate using images, but that communication is limited when compared to words. You can argue that we can communicate using sounds, but unless those sounds are words, the communication is limited in the same way as when using pure…

> You can argue that we can communicate using images, but that communication is limited when compared to words.

Like so many other things, it depends. When people are online looking to book a bed and breakfast, buy a pair of shoes or find a date, they tend to find images very valuable indeed. In fact, in the absence of images, many of the web's transactions would simply not happen.

It's not for nothing that we often say, 'a picture is worth a thousand words'.

Re: This is a web page

#263

Post by logn »

Thank you. I've shared this with someone whom I know who's interested in learning to program. I think HTML is a great first step. After you learn HTML you can learn to write programs to generate HTML... and that's an application. From there you could learn more advanced programming concepts or native app development, but I think this is probably the best way to introduce people to programming, something which seems almost magical and impossible, until you get the right introduction.

Re: This is a web page

#264

Post by MichaelGG »

strickjb9 wrote: post #207
wmeredith wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's all fine and dandy, but what if we measure "what the web is for" in bandwidth? What do most people use the web "for"? Netflix and YouTube, I'd wager.

No, you are thinking of TCP. This is an article about HTTP. (in terms of bandwidth, HTTP ⊆ TCP)

Pretty sure YouTube is transported over HTTP. Not sure about Netflix but I wouldn't be surprised.

HTTP has become a generic TCP wrapper for the common request->response pattern.

Re: This is a web page

#266

Post by howeman »

petercooper wrote: post #239
simpleglider wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic…

I was at a computer camp sometime around '94, and the camp had a printed "Directory of web pages" which was exactly like the yellow pages of the phone book. You would look up a subject, and it had a printed list of urls on that subject.

Re: This is a web page

#267

Post by pnathan »

lukifer wrote: post #167
pnathan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a good citation for the primacy of linguistic communication? I have become profoundly convinced over the last 15 years that words (& to an extent, text ), is the generally best mode of communication of meaning, beating out things such as video, images, smells, etc. But I've been generally unable to articulate that idea cleanly and persuasively.

Al Gore articulates the value of text well in _The Assault on Reason_. Short version: text is a "cool" medium which only indirectly rouses emotion, while images, sounds and especially video are "hot" mediums that are much more likely to bypass the prefrontal cortex, and directly stimulate emotional reactions.

That sounds like it derives from McLuhan's theories in "Understanding Media: Extensions of Man", a book I'm currently reading.

Re: This is a web page

#268

Post by josephlord »

pnathan wrote: post #134
kragen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that the article doesn't try to actually make the case for the primacy of linguistic communication, and I'm not going to take the time to do it here either. I'll just say that while I agree with you that a diversity of media is better than just one medium, I spent my childhood, before the Web was built, reading books instead of watching TV on purpose, not by accident. Books without pictures. And it's…

Do you have a good citation for the primacy of linguistic communication? I have become profoundly convinced over the last 15 years that words (& to an extent, text ), is the generally best mode of communication of meaning, beating out things such as video, images, smells, etc. But I've been generally unable to articulate that idea cleanly and persuasively.

I'm not sure it is universal. I love the written word [1]. You can be precise and make nuanced arguments with caveats and qualifications where required. You can skim when reading it in a way you can't[2] with video. However some things are better and more easily shown than explained and some people have a preference for visual explanations.

[1] As I suspect most people spending much time on this site do as they aren't here for the pictures.

[2] Actually video editing software does give mechanisms for rapidly scanning the video so perhaps it is possible but not offered in web video software that I have seen.

Re: This is a web page

#269

Post by michaelochurch »

bitwize wrote: post #150
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…

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…

I agree. Also, upvoted for motherfucking civilization.

Re: This is a web page

#270

Post by calinet6 »

tl wrote: post #179
smackfu wrote: post #161

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.

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.

That's quite beautiful for such a small stylesheet.

I once almost started a web site called SimpleStyleSheets that had that goal -- maximum of 4 lines of CSS, no ugly compression, maximum of 120 characters per line. And see how good you can make a page of simple semantic content look.

I should do it now -- it'd be a good exercise in this day of complex designs and bloated styles.

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