3 ms·

> When making the contrast of the text lower and lower... designers need to think of > elderly users with bad vision > low quality monitors > bad lighting an

by a3n 9y ago

> When making the contrast of the text lower and lower... designers need to think of > elderly users with bad vision > low quality monitors > bad lighting and glare > reading on tiny screens And easily pissed off curmudgeons like myself. I immediately hit "No Styles" at the slightest visual irritation; low contrast is the most common. I'll do this many times in a day, with a satisfied, grumbled "harumph." I suppose that I, a mere reader/user, am at the end of the line of stakeholders, with the purchasing/contracting manager at the front, and I suppose "oooh" helps get a lot of contracts signed. So good for you, I wish you well, and it's easy enough to erase all your hard work and go directly to 1992 black text on white with obvious blue/purple links. You can do this in Firefox as: View/Page Style/No Style. My favorite Firefox addon, making it one click: Disable Style Button https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-style-button/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-style... I enjoy a nicely styled, pleasant site, but I only read about 80% of them as-is.

CaptSpify 9y ago
Another couple of things that I do: I disable javascript, and I use ublock-origin's element picker to hide what I don't want to see. A normal webpage: https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/before_bullshit.png https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/before_bullshit.png The same page when I'm done with it: https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/after_bullshit.png https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/after_bullshit.png I sync those templates across my computers for sites I visit often. Makes them much more readable/useable.
- lowmagnet 9y ago
  You might want to style that after a little following Butterick's advice. Specifically for legibility and flow. It's amazing what line length, font size, and a few other choices help. http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.html http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.htm...
mrob 9y ago
Not only does disabling CSS styles fix bad design, it often fixes websites that refuse to render when JavaScript is disabled. I also use "No Style" frequently.
CalChris 9y ago
The equivalent in Chrome is to install the Web Developer plugin and click CSS->Disable All Styles.
phantom_package 9y ago
I'm curious how well this works. A big part of design (aside from visual pleasantness) is information hierarchy, in which layout (order/spacing/size/etc) of various pieces of content is manipulated (via css) for emphasis (or deemphasis). When you turn off all the styles, you're still getting an information hierarchy (top to bottom) - but it's now being determined by the order of html elements on the page, not the layout the designer used css to achieve. These hierarchies were probably the same on the early-web, but not so much these days.
- a3n 9y ago
  Before my reply, a request to designers: please arrange your elements so that they make sense when viewed without styles, for curmudgeons like me, and for people who use text browsers and visual assist tools. Important content first, and sidebars and ads last, would be great. Reply: It works better than leaving the site as-is, in an unreadable or annoying state. This happens most often, believe it or not, with news outlets (sorry, can't think of one). What you get is an incredibly long page, with the content usually somewhere in the middle, preceded and followed by multiple instances of links to the same other stories. It's not that hard to just grab the mouse and zoom the scroll bar down to what looks most obviously like what you're looking for: a bunch of unmolested text paragraphs. With "private" sites like personal blogs and whatnot, the result of hitting the no styles button is the same, but usually the useless before and after matter is not as long. I really don't have a problem doing that, and once I get to unmolested content I almost always enjoy it or find it useful. It's better than bailing, most of the time, and there doesn't seem to be any correlation between "this site sucks for me visually" and the quality of the actual content. So it's usually worth giving it a try. EDIT: >A big part of design (aside from visual pleasantness) is information hierarchy, ... This is virtually never important to me, because I virtually never get to anyone's page from their front page. I got to your page through someone else's aggregation. HN obviously. The NYT front page (hold on, hold on :) is just an aggregator of links to their stories, and the front page looks nothing like the story pages. Google news is an aggregator to pages within other outlets' aggregations. I virtually always ignore virtually everything on a page that's not the content I came to read, and nothing on any of the site's other pages helped me get there, because I was never there. Someone else must have been there for the HN link to exist, and maybe (or maybe not) the ephemera helped them make a link for me. But it wasn't me. Why do I not visit Art of Manliness, or some software blog, regularly? Because they rarely post anything I care about, certainly not often enough for me to gamble my time that maybe, this time, I'll find something worth reading. Investors use OPM, Other Peoples' Money, to make money. I use OPT, Other Peoples' Time, to find content worth reading on the web, and I'm as unapologetic as investors for that. Mmmm, coffee ...

by a3n 9y ago

CaptSpify 9y ago

Another couple of things that I do: I disable javascript, and I use ublock-origin's element picker to hide what I don't want to see. A normal webpage: https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/before_bullshit.png https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/before_bullshit.png The same page when I'm done with it: https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/after_bullshit.png https://blog.thekyel.com/entries/after_bullshit.png I sync those templates across my computers for sites I visit often. Makes them much more readable/useable.

lowmagnet 9y ago
You might want to style that after a little following Butterick's advice. Specifically for legibility and flow. It's amazing what line length, font size, and a few other choices help. http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.html http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.htm...

mrob 9y ago

Not only does disabling CSS styles fix bad design, it often fixes websites that refuse to render when JavaScript is disabled. I also use "No Style" frequently.

CalChris 9y ago

The equivalent in Chrome is to install the Web Developer plugin and click CSS->Disable All Styles.

phantom_package 9y ago

I'm curious how well this works. A big part of design (aside from visual pleasantness) is information hierarchy, in which layout (order/spacing/size/etc) of various pieces of content is manipulated (via css) for emphasis (or deemphasis). When you turn off all the styles, you're still getting an information hierarchy (top to bottom) - but it's now being determined by the order of html elements on the page, not the layout the designer used css to achieve. These hierarchies were probably the same on the early-web, but not so much these days.

a3n 9y ago
Before my reply, a request to designers: please arrange your elements so that they make sense when viewed without styles, for curmudgeons like me, and for people who use text browsers and visual assist tools. Important content first, and sidebars and ads last, would be great. Reply: It works better than leaving the site as-is, in an unreadable or annoying state. This happens most often, believe it or not, with news outlets (sorry, can't think of one). What you get is an incredibly long page, with the content usually somewhere in the middle, preceded and followed by multiple instances of links to the same other stories. It's not that hard to just grab the mouse and zoom the scroll bar down to what looks most obviously like what you're looking for: a bunch of unmolested text paragraphs. With "private" sites like personal blogs and whatnot, the result of hitting the no styles button is the same, but usually the useless before and after matter is not as long. I really don't have a problem doing that, and once I get to unmolested content I almost always enjoy it or find it useful. It's better than bailing, most of the time, and there doesn't seem to be any correlation between "this site sucks for me visually" and the quality of the actual content. So it's usually worth giving it a try. EDIT: >A big part of design (aside from visual pleasantness) is information hierarchy, ... This is virtually never important to me, because I virtually never get to anyone's page from their front page. I got to your page through someone else's aggregation. HN obviously. The NYT front page (hold on, hold on :) is just an aggregator of links to their stories, and the front page looks nothing like the story pages. Google news is an aggregator to pages within other outlets' aggregations. I virtually always ignore virtually everything on a page that's not the content I came to read, and nothing on any of the site's other pages helped me get there, because I was never there. Someone else must have been there for the HN link to exist, and maybe (or maybe not) the ephemera helped them make a link for me. But it wasn't me. Why do I not visit Art of Manliness, or some software blog, regularly? Because they rarely post anything I care about, certainly not often enough for me to gamble my time that maybe, this time, I'll find something worth reading. Investors use OPM, Other Peoples' Money, to make money. I use OPT, Other Peoples' Time, to find content worth reading on the web, and I'm as unapologetic as investors for that. Mmmm, coffee ...