How the Web Became Unreadable • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#341

Post by kwhitefoot » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 6:30 AM UTC

rocky1138 wrote: post #174

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.

We had this. It was amazing. It was called textmode.org. You pasted the URL after the slash and it would give you just the text, e.g., http://textmode.org/http://website-a-b-c.com I died a little inside the day it went down.

Was it open source? If so it should be possible to run it locally. Might be an interesting project for someone.

But of course you can go a long way toward it just by switching to View|Page Style|No Style in Firefox.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#342

Post by unicornporn » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 8:33 AM UTC

Senji wrote: post #330

unicornporn wrote: post #38

I'm so surprised that all attempts at solutions for "readability" so far seems to have addressed the actual article or post content only. I don't just want to read a sane looking web, I want to browse a accessible and sane looking web. I'd like to be able to activate a browser mode that cleans up not only the content of the site, but also the structure by creating simple and accessible navigation (perhaps according t…

Maybe just expose the service through some json delivered api "views" of the raw server db.

That would be insanely cool, but near impossible to get even a fraction of website providers on that board. I mean, RSS has died for a reason. People (generally) don't make money from cleaned up and ad free content.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#343

Post by unicornporn » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 9:06 AM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #58

unicornporn wrote: post #38

I'm so surprised that all attempts at solutions for "readability" so far seems to have addressed the actual article or post content only. I don't just want to read a sane looking web, I want to browse a accessible and sane looking web. I'd like to be able to activate a browser mode that cleans up not only the content of the site, but also the structure by creating simple and accessible navigation (perhaps according t…

Reminds me that Opera's Mini browser (a proxy browser that originated on J2ME enabled featurephones) have a single column option. This will attempt to rearrange a page so that everything is a single column that fits the width of the device screen.

I have a vague memory of this from my late feature phone days. I remember I actually enjoyed using it considering how limited the possibilities were on these phones.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#344

Post by lucb1e » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 9:49 AM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #334

lucb1e wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that better?

If a user sets their default font size to 26px, then a max-width of 600px may be too small... if a user sets their font size to 10px then 600px may be too wide. A value of 35em would scale the container based on the user's selected font size. Containers should be relative to their content.

Makes sense. Thanks!

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#345

Post by newscracker » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

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.…

I find a white background (for commonly used black text) to be quite harsh on my eyes and don't like it much. So when I had to redesign the UI for an application, I went from a pure white background to a more grayish background (a bit further from #ffffff, in the #eX series), which had a good level of contrast with the text color (a very dark blue) while not appearing blinding.

Contrast is very important for all (and also from the accessibility point of view), and the article shows some really awful contrast levels in the screenshots.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#346

Post by flamedoge » Fri, Oct 21, 2016, 10:11 PM UTC

jonstokes wrote: post #55

Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…

4-4chan works!

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#347

Post by Can_Not » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #284

flukus wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that once you're trying to hide info or functionality it's because you don't know the users workflow. Understanding workflow is the key to usability, at least with LOB apps, trying to cram everyone's needs into a single table or building UI's that are essentially skins over database tables make for some awful UI's.

> cram everyone's needs into a single table or building UI's that are essentially skins over database tables make for some awful UI's ... which, after you learn how to use them, often work much faster than the alternatives. There are anecdotes a-plenty here like our local (tiny) bank who held out replacing their terminal based with their Windows version because in tests the keyboard based, archaic, every-on-one-scree…

Reminds when nvidia removed their control panel and replaced it with... I'm not sure what it was. There was 2 mostly blank white highly padded pages, a spinning 3d logo, and maybe a grand total of 4 input fields to edit? It was utterly useless. Around 8 years ago you could use a RegEdit to get the original back. I hope it's still possible. The original control panel was full of features and they simply removed them all.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#348

Post by Can_Not » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 7:49 PM UTC

usaphp wrote: post #73

jonstokes wrote: post #55

Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable (if not exactly stable in the case of iTunes), and have been iterated and stylized to the point where I routinely get enraged by them. At least Google Maps has walked back that terrible accordion thing that literally drove me crazy. I basically think design is like…

> "Designers are ruining software in general. iTunes, the iOS music app, and Google Maps are just a few pieces of software that started out relatively usable" Did it ever occurs to you that they had far less functionality when these examples were created? Backend programmers kept piling functionality into these apps and at some point no matter how good a designer is it just gets overwhelmed.

I doubt that was the case. I'm not familiar with those specific cases, but typically in my experience when the padding increases, the usability and feature count drop exponentially.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#349

Post by JoshMnem » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 8:25 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #339

JoshMnem wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything about Material Design is bad, but many of the implementations are bad, including many of Google's. Problems with Material Design include: - overly bright/saturated colors - too much animation - obnoxious easings - an overly dry look -- kind of like formal stationary or plastic - centered text and content at the tops of pages (I don't know if the specification encourages this, but it's become more commo…

I agree on the colors, it doesn't need to be pastels, that's easy enough to change. Animation, if it doesn't detract, or actually adds to the experience, sure, but agreed, some of it is superfluous. Easings, that goes with the animations. The dry/stationary look, I think is intentional, and I like it. Centered text/content is arguable, I think it depends on the form and can vary. As to the text inputs being lines, I…

I don't mind pastel colors. Material Design doesn't recommend pastels -- they recommend garish, over-saturated colors.

The docs say:

"Material takes cues from contemporary architecture, road signs, pavement marking tape, and athletic courts. Color should be unexpected and vibrant."

Things like pavement marking tape, road signs, and athletic courts are not aesthetically-pleasing models of design, and it shows in the final result.

Recommended colors like #e91e63 and #ff5722 look terrible on many monitors. Looking away from the monitor leaves a reverse impression of the color in my vision.

These recommended color schemes are distractingly unpleasant: https://material.google.com/style/color.html#color-color-sch...

Many sites these days don't consider that some people get disoriented by animation. If I'm trying to read an article, and parts of the page are animating with parallax effect or growing/shrinking, it pulls my attention away from the content. I don't want components to flip over, bounce, or use other "cute" easings. I sometimes stop using websites just because of that.

> Centered text/content is arguable, I think it depends on the form and can vary.

Centered text is the Comic Sans of page layout. It's one of the tools that people who don't know about design reach for first. Centered text should only be used extremely sparingly, so that the viewer doesn't really notice it. Lately, centered text is becoming the focal point of web pages. Some sites are even creating "pyramids" of focus at the tops of pages, using centered text with a user profile picture on top. It looks really bad.

> As to the text inputs being lines, I actually prefer the material way, it's closer to what you'd see on paper forms

A web page is not paper, because you can't "write" anywhere on a webpage. It should be clear where one can enter text -- a line does not communicate that well.

Also, having the line animate when clicked on does nothing useful except distract. When I click on an input, I will know that it's focused by the existence of a cursor in the text area.

The end result is that multiple areas of a page are animating at the same time. The interfaces become confusing, because animation says "look at this part of the page", but multiple areas are animating without coherent reason.

Meetup.com's new app and color scheme is a recent example of the serious problems with Material Design. Even my group's members are complaining about it.

Basically, Material Design has a very strong personality, and it's the kind of personality that many people are not compatible with. In my opinion, it might be okay for a niche product, but is not a good choice for websites aimed at large audiences.

Re: How the Web Became Unreadable

#350

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Oct 22, 2016, 11:19 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #166

eitland wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying this is always the case but I wonder if, in some of the cases, this is what makes it hard for designers to get accepted in open source: the fact that many of the developers are also users and as such are pretty opinionated while the designers that come to open source might often be very eager to "set their mark" on something?

I doubt there are many designers working on OSS who don't also use it. I' even doubt the premise that there are terrible open source UIs created by designers. The vast majority of OSS GUI apps were probably styled by programmers, and I think they proved quite well over last 20 years that they chose well when not becoming designers. The problem with design is also that it doesn't work very well in the "bazaar" style o…

OSS interface design is really crazy, IMHO. Even quite popular software such as GIMP and InkScape, which I myself use all the time, have some (again, IMHO) absurd UI mistakes.

With GIMP it's the sliders in the tool options. Once you have them figured out (the trick is, they behave differently when you drag on the top half of the slider or the bottom half ... it's indicated by the cursor changing, but still) they're kind of usable, but still awkward. If you don't know how they work (and they're quite unlike any other GUI widget I've encountered), you click and now your brush size is 1233.12 pixels, so you just decide to enter the value manually by keyboard. There's a couple of truly useless default values for some tools. Third, if you want to adjust or create a new brush, or gradient, the workflow has about 2 popup dialogs too many. I could go on ...

In InkScape, my main beef is the gradient editor. The old one was awkward and counter-intuitive when adding new stops. Then they made some huge upgrades (honestly, a lot of great improvements btw), also changed the gradient editor. Now it's slightly less awkward and slightly less counter-intuitive, but not much.

These are two great pieces of software and I love using them for the most part (although GIMP really needs to grow up and support 16 bit colour), it's just that these are some really odd choices for a couple of UI widgets that get a serious amount of use in most workflows. And I don't understand why, they could literally implement a design based on any vaguely similar control widget in other software and it would be 10x easier to use. Yet they choose to roll their own very unique behaviour that honestly just doesn't work very smoothly.