341–350 of 445 posts
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Drawings are the heart and soul of civilization. For one, they originated ~37 thousand years before the first written language. Second, understanding text requires knowing how the information it contains is encoded (what language it is written in). Drawings are far more universal.
It is speech that is most universal -- words. Drawing came after, and relegated to being foci of rituals and stories that were spoken and symbolic of spoken agreements.
"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…
Slightly off topic, but if we're talking about simplicity... why are people still using this doctype: " rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> instead of the beautifully simple HTML5 doctype: I get that people might use the old doctype out of habit, but it's such an ugly, unnecessary habit, and it would probably be smart to work on discarding it. At the very least, we should be making sure that new dev…
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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.
The heart of most TV Shows and Movies? A screenplay. Words. Dressed up with faces and costumes and animation, but words nonetheless. I'll grant you that YouTube has a lot of cat videos, which probably doesn't have words in it. But those vlogs have a hell of a lot of words in them too. --- A lot of video is streamed with RTMP, yes, but a lot of Netflix and YouTube content is available over HTTP now too (albeit in the…
What the author extols in word is something quite effectively conveyed in many forms of art. Just as there is great beauty in the text of Baudelaire, there is incredible emotive power in koyaanisqatsi.
We should accept the author's challenge to behave with more conviction and purpose, to express ourselves in a more meaningful way. But to do so in word alone is too restrictive for the imagination to bear.
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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".
Couldn't the same be said about Hacker News? Search has improved, but we still rely on "sites with links" to find interesting content.
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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…
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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.
In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996. The mother…