Google Is Not God of the Web

Sometimes you should have the choice of making a slow web site that doesn't fit on the phone screen. A large corporation shouldn't dictate how you present your information.

Sometimes you want to put a document on the web without having to pay someone to run on Google's treadmill of changing standards and policies for the rest of your life.

I'll take a crappy-looking web site with good content over an SEO-pumped disaster that provided no information.

Craigslist, eBay, and dozens of others didn't get to be huge because of their good looks.

Usability features like dyslexia friendly fonts, large fonts, etc., belong in the browser, not on a web page. If anything, this would be easier on the alternative web.

The key idea would be that when you go to a URL on this alternative web, you know you're not going to get slammed with some cycle-sucking, RAM-sucking, virus-carrying, UI horror. More gopher-ish, but relatable to those who have used a web browser.

I can dream.

edit: Ha. Right now, this comment has 6 points, and my original above has -2 points. My illusions of HN rationality are thus reduced. sniff

You have any reasoning behind this or are you taking the people who killed the product at face value? If I were to guess that product (i have no idea to what you’re referring) was designed to fail, like youtube premium.

- Small size is not always better, especially when the wait may be worth it for the audience

- Minimalistic design is not always necessary, and in fact it's a good idea to take some risks in the other direction, if it could result in a desired outcome

- Google doesn't have an intrinsic right to dictate best practices. In fact, the idea of a single set of best practices runs counter to the spirit of the web, in which a website can be a creative or cultural experience which transcends convention.

- In addition, on that last item: The web _can be_ more than what it is now. So monolithic standards could easily get in the way.

- Google is going to hold an event and tell visitors how to conduct "modern web development." The author is not comfortable with Google's singular focus on Google's preferred standard and mode of web development being The Only Way, so they are going to attend and push back.

It's a good post. Even the headline by itself resonates in a lot of different ways, especially if you've spent a lot of time on the receiving end of Google's dev messaging.

Speaking more broadly, quite often the blanket design advice given to web enthusiasts and subjective-values-driven creatives comes from the economic side of the web. It starts from "don't annoy your users" and draws a (suspiciously) straight line from there directly to "Largest Contentful Paint". This represents a potentially huge, complicating energy drain for a project that may have a lot of other important design parameters to start with.

In another way, it changes the question. The web wasn't designed as a way to get your customers really specific information as quickly as possible. There's so much more to it than that.

A lot of HN users are researchers from the economics-first side of things though, not artists, so this may be a bit hard to understand. It's like hearing yet another friend tell you they've signed on for a liberal arts degree.

Such researcher-consumers (who incidentally write some amazing online reviews, but that's another story) are also well known for getting frustrated at the slightest delay or sales pitch. Art on the web can end up, therefore, being perceived as a broken web experience, a bad sales pitch for an ephemeral and vapid product, as opposed to something which inspires or changes viewpoints. "I can't even find the site map!"

The web doesn't even have to be users-first--quite often what's best is a series of standards and compromises that alternately put creators and users first at different points.