Loved the story about the squirrel
"One's she had to go the emergency tree" caused me to spit out my drink a little with laughter. All done with words.
This is a web page
301–310 of 445 posts
Re: This is a web page
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
"not everyone can produce [...] responsive design" Notice that the page is automatically responsive, and is perfectly usable on a phone, tablet, or anything else. If your page has no CSS styles it will be perfectly responsive. If it's not, you've messed up that nice feature of the web with your stylesheet. Now you probably think you need to learn about media queries to make it work again.
I would actually argue that raw text is not 'responsive,' because column widths that are as wide as a large monitor are incredibly difficult to read.
That's a good point, but you are sort of redefining responsive. The unstyled HTML (not raw text) will still flow to any size window. The problem you mention can be fixed with a "max width", as in the original article.
Re: This is a web page
#303Earlier 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…
As late as 1998 I remember a friend griping about people who said that a site on topic X was good "because of the links".
Re: This is a web page
#304"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…
One word (pun intended): Hieroglyphs.
Re: This is a web page
#305There's something magical about personal websites. Something that a Facebook profile page or a Twitter stream or a Tumblr will never reach. I really wish more people would go back to the earlier roots of the internet, and share what's on their mind in a more personal and genuine way.
I agree completely. Learning HTML was such an empowering feeling for me. You can make something fancy or minimal, whatever you feel like. We are all unique and personal websites show that much better than a social media website ever can IMHO
I miss MySpace pages too.
Re: This is a web page
#306[deleted]
Re: This is a web page
#307Earlier 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.
A good citation? It's a value judgment.
Re: This is a web page
#308Earlier 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…
> I have much more frequently seen video whose author had deluded himself into thinking it was beautiful. I have some sympathy for your point, but I don't think the argument about video is valid. 99% of the web is crap. Always has been. Probably always will be. The crap includes text, video, etc., etc. That's why we have search engines and sites like HN -- to help us find the 1%. The existence of the other crappy 99%…
Point — but you're even less optimistic than Gresham!
Re: This is a web page
#309"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…
[deleted]
Re: This is a web page
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>"At it's heart, web design should be about words." >No. There's some strange dissonance going on in my head reading this on a site with practically no images at all. Once images went inline, the web's focus moved from content to presentation, much to its detriment (in my humble opinion). We progressively became more at the mercy of the page designer rather than the copy editor.
I don't think posting a comment counts as "web design". Nobody said "writing comments shouldn't be about words".
There is a "design" to this page. It just doesn't include pictures, videos, hover bars, animated banners, nor advertisements for weird tricks to lose weight. This site is about the flow of textual information.
I like a usable application interface as much as the next guy, and am quite happy to see native interfaces (even if they aren't my beloved WPF ;-) rise back into prominence so that the hyper-text transfer protocol can get back to carrying hyper-text.