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My experience with Japanese websites: * All text is embedded. Fat chance ever finding it with a search engine, copying anything, searching within the page, or

My experience with Japanese websites: * All text is embedded. Fat chance ever finding it with a search engine, copying anything, searching within the page, or using Google Translate on it * Every URL is guaranteed to die. While link rot is pretty common in Western webdev as well, things like SEO have caused some to clamp down on it. And it's no way as bad as it is in Japan, where I'll come back a month later to find the link dead or the whole website has moved and none of the old content exists anymore. * They still use Flash. * Navigation is often not as efficient as it can be, with sites often throwing you on a landing page, navbars being confusing, and lack of search * Images are often low resolution and low quality Some of the reasons given in the article make sense (for example webfonts being expensive or large in size), but it's really disappointing when you compare it to a Japanese novel or magazine and see that the country is perfectly capable of beautiful work.

aikinai 9y ago
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; this is all true.
freehunter 9y ago
I noticed the first one when I clicked a link here in these comments to a JP site and clicked "translate" in Chrome... it translated much of the page, but quite a bit of text was in images and of course couldn't be translated. Then of course I switched to Amazon.com for a comparison and almost every word on the page was part of an image and could not be translated either. I guess it's more common than I thought.
bootlooped 9y ago
Based on this, I can say I think that Korea may be worse: * Many websites, especially government ones, require Active X. You might need to dust off that IE6 installation file. * In lieu of Active X, some sites require you to download and install their own proprietary "security" program; what it does, I don't think anybody really knows * Like you describe Japan, lots of Korean text is embedded in an image * Many sites try to prevent users from right clicking or copying text, for "security" of course * The eCommerce site I used had quality issues similar to Ali Express. Listings could be anything, a seller could list a baseball bat, a cell phone and a watermelon on the same page. Sellers would play this trick of having at least 2 variations of a product, one being a very low price and also conveniently out of stock all the time, this would ensure it showed up when you sort products by lowest price first, but it was impossible to ever get it for that price. When I was there a year or so ago it was getting better. Hopefully it's mostly fixed by now. On the bright side the internet is really fast and cheap.

aikinai 9y ago

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; this is all true.

freehunter 9y ago

I noticed the first one when I clicked a link here in these comments to a JP site and clicked "translate" in Chrome... it translated much of the page, but quite a bit of text was in images and of course couldn't be translated. Then of course I switched to Amazon.com for a comparison and almost every word on the page was part of an image and could not be translated either. I guess it's more common than I thought.

bootlooped 9y ago

Based on this, I can say I think that Korea may be worse: * Many websites, especially government ones, require Active X. You might need to dust off that IE6 installation file. * In lieu of Active X, some sites require you to download and install their own proprietary "security" program; what it does, I don't think anybody really knows * Like you describe Japan, lots of Korean text is embedded in an image * Many sites try to prevent users from right clicking or copying text, for "security" of course * The eCommerce site I used had quality issues similar to Ali Express. Listings could be anything, a seller could list a baseball bat, a cell phone and a watermelon on the same page. Sellers would play this trick of having at least 2 variations of a product, one being a very low price and also conveniently out of stock all the time, this would ensure it showed up when you sort products by lowest price first, but it was impossible to ever get it for that price. When I was there a year or so ago it was getting better. Hopefully it's mostly fixed by now. On the bright side the internet is really fast and cheap.