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Humans can only focus on a single thing at a time. As your focus goes through any content, it necessarily follows a 1D path. HTML, eint Text, is also one-dimen

Humans can only focus on a single thing at a time. As your focus goes through any content, it necessarily follows a 1D path. HTML, eint Text, is also one-dimensional. CSS, as said before, transfers this 1D information into the 2D representation on a scree, or a printout. Or it leaves it allone, or rearranges the 1D stream, for a different 1D representation to a screen reader. This has nothing to do with being a “historical artifact”. It’s a fundamental idea of communication theory. But maybe it helps you to see its value if I just mention that thinking a bit about such theory will make it far easier to you to create designs on the vastly different devices, from smart watches to Times Square screens connected too the internet now.

zeroname 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
hnaccy 8y ago
This one dimensional curve of focus throughout a 2D page will be different on each viewing and for different people. That's why the 2D layout is important because it can help assist or guide the creation of this path. For many pages there is no fixed "proper" path through the content even though the DOM is necessarily in some order.
nnq 8y ago
> As your focus goes through any content, it necessarily follows a 1D path No. Not at all. Almost never. Your brain is a chiefly parallel processing device, no matter how much you delude yourself that "you read text in the order it was written" and other such nonsense... It's widely known that this is not even how people read text. Even when you listen to music, and nothing is more 1D than sound, your brain chops it up and rearranges in multiple concurrent variants trying to "do the shazam thing" of identifying what else it may be even a bit similar to even if you don't realize it... "Following a 1D path" through content is what you do when you either want (1) to reliably communicate at the lowest imaginable common denominator with people with unknown and presumed low skill and intelligence (eg. "talk to a customer" or "talk to the bank teller") or with people so mentally different from you that they are close to being a different species (eg. "talk to an accountant or lawyer" or "send a binary encoded message to maybe be received and decoded by an alien civilization"), or (2) you actually want to force a particular interpretation of the sequence and causality of things to people (eg. "explaining history to people" or "telling an educational story" or "manipulating people" or... "selling stuff to people"). All the other communication, and more like the only part of interpersonal communication that I find interesting is non sequential, it's about working with information that can be rearranged in multiple equally valid sequences and interpretable in multiple possible causality graphs. Think maps and painting. Or a textual description of a stack of maps etc.. Or computer code as it actually gets executed on an even slightly parallel machine (not "as it stays written code in a text file", that's also a "lowest common denominator representation" bc human and computer brains are so different).

zeroname 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

hnaccy 8y ago

This one dimensional curve of focus throughout a 2D page will be different on each viewing and for different people. That's why the 2D layout is important because it can help assist or guide the creation of this path. For many pages there is no fixed "proper" path through the content even though the DOM is necessarily in some order.

nnq 8y ago

> As your focus goes through any content, it necessarily follows a 1D path No. Not at all. Almost never. Your brain is a chiefly parallel processing device, no matter how much you delude yourself that "you read text in the order it was written" and other such nonsense... It's widely known that this is not even how people read text. Even when you listen to music, and nothing is more 1D than sound, your brain chops it up and rearranges in multiple concurrent variants trying to "do the shazam thing" of identifying what else it may be even a bit similar to even if you don't realize it... "Following a 1D path" through content is what you do when you either want (1) to reliably communicate at the lowest imaginable common denominator with people with unknown and presumed low skill and intelligence (eg. "talk to a customer" or "talk to the bank teller") or with people so mentally different from you that they are close to being a different species (eg. "talk to an accountant or lawyer" or "send a binary encoded message to maybe be received and decoded by an alien civilization"), or (2) you actually want to force a particular interpretation of the sequence and causality of things to people (eg. "explaining history to people" or "telling an educational story" or "manipulating people" or... "selling stuff to people"). All the other communication, and more like the only part of interpersonal communication that I find interesting is non sequential, it's about working with information that can be rearranged in multiple equally valid sequences and interpretable in multiple possible causality graphs. Think maps and painting. Or a textual description of a stack of maps etc.. Or computer code as it actually gets executed on an even slightly parallel machine (not "as it stays written code in a text file", that's also a "lowest common denominator representation" bc human and computer brains are so different).