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I won’t argue that today’s web landscape isn’t bloated, but the designs you built in 199x had potential audiences several degrees of magnitude smaller and less

by danso 7y ago

I won’t argue that today’s web landscape isn’t bloated, but the designs you built in 199x had potential audiences several degrees of magnitude smaller and less diverse (in terms of users and devices) than what the average webdev has today. I don’t think it’s possible to have such breadth and size of userbase and use-cases without a non-trivial increase in build complexity.

hedora 7y ago
Why should a layout designer care which device the document is rendered on? (Beyond form factor which is addressed by “ promotional posters, business cards and info booklets (basically, almost all websites you can imagine, but on paper)”) Similarly, how does CSS help me translate my document? (based on the court findings in the recent Dominos case, web accessibility technologies may as well not exist, even though that problem has also been solved for paper for a century).
- danso 7y ago
  Huh? Nothing is stopping you today from creating an image map or do table-based design, other than a client who wants a mobile-friendly design. I don't recall mentioning anything about translation. I don't know what hot-button issue you're going on about but I have a feeling it's tangential to the topic of web design.
  - hedora 7y ago
    The article specifically calls out css usability and rendering fidelity as things they are interested in. Pre-web, a content layout shop could apparently do about 20 designs (in three form factors each) per seat, per week. These would be done to best-practices, and also be aesthetically pleasing. I don’t think that is true for modern web design. If anyone here has that sort of design throughput, I’m guessing a lot of people on this thread would be interested in it.
    - danso 7y ago
      I did print design (e.g. PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop) and web design (including Flash) in the early web days. The workflow and output is not comparable, period. Print and web layout both have their respective inherent advantages and limitations. But I think it's self evident that, in general, a webpage is meant to have far more interactive features for a far bigger audience across a far bigger variety of devices than a print design. But I'm happy to see examples of PDFs that are the exception to this.
alxlaz 7y ago
It may not possible, but that doesn't mean the HTML and CSS clusterfuck is anywhere near the level we'd have expected back in the 1990s. None of the tools we have today can hold a candle to a proper UI builder -- which would suffice for a lot of "progressive" web apps. Back In The Day (TM), with a proper UI builder (as seen in Visual Basic, C++ Builder, Qt Designer) I could build ten different versions of the same dialog, for ten different resolutions and aspect ratios, in about the same time it takes me to get a button to stay where I want it in CSS. And, by the way, the weirdness of the day -- and the capabilities of the tools -- shouldn't be underestimated! The good ones did proper relative positioning and alignment, supported various kinds of "flowing" layouts and so on. It wasn't uncommon to have to support all modes between 640x480@4 and 2048x1536@32, and basically no applications ran in full-screen mode, so you didn't have about a dozen resolutions and aspect ratios, you had pretty much an infinite number of combinations.
- danso 7y ago
  Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the generated HTML/CSS/JS that it generates, but don't services like Wix make it incredibly easy for a layperson to build a servicable and attractive UI? Again, I reiterate that the generated code is an absolute clusterfuck (even compared to what I remember Frontpage 99 making), but from what I can tell, the end-user never touches the generated raw code.
  - alxlaz 7y ago
    Tools like the ones I mentioned weren't meant to allow a layperson to build an UI, they were meant to allow developers to build an UI. The experience hasn't degraded much for people who don't write code for a living, but it has degraded significantly for developers. FWIW, it's part of why I moved away from all this stuff, more than 15 years ago. I discovered a lot of other fun things computers could do (I got into embedded programming, operating systems, security etc.), and web development stopped being fun when we seriously continued digging the hole we were into instead of climbing out of it.
    - y4mi 7y ago
goatlover 7y ago
But the Flash Designer could accommodate more design complexity and would scale to different screen sizes. It's not impossible to build modern RAD tooling and layout designers. Even some of the ones existing on the web these days for end users aren't bad.
wruza 7y ago
“I don’t think it’s possible to have such breadth and size of userbase and use-cases without a non-trivial increase in build complexity.” But why? What in full-flexible geometry and linear problem solving prevents us to support diverse userbases or devices? I’m not speaking about throwing away accessibility support or using fixed-size medium. I’m simply asking for sane math-based rather than MSWord-based primitives.

by danso 7y ago

hedora 7y ago

Why should a layout designer care which device the document is rendered on? (Beyond form factor which is addressed by “ promotional posters, business cards and info booklets (basically, almost all websites you can imagine, but on paper)”) Similarly, how does CSS help me translate my document? (based on the court findings in the recent Dominos case, web accessibility technologies may as well not exist, even though that problem has also been solved for paper for a century).

danso 7y ago
Huh? Nothing is stopping you today from creating an image map or do table-based design, other than a client who wants a mobile-friendly design. I don't recall mentioning anything about translation. I don't know what hot-button issue you're going on about but I have a feeling it's tangential to the topic of web design.
- hedora 7y ago
  The article specifically calls out css usability and rendering fidelity as things they are interested in. Pre-web, a content layout shop could apparently do about 20 designs (in three form factors each) per seat, per week. These would be done to best-practices, and also be aesthetically pleasing. I don’t think that is true for modern web design. If anyone here has that sort of design throughput, I’m guessing a lot of people on this thread would be interested in it.
  - danso 7y ago
    I did print design (e.g. PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop) and web design (including Flash) in the early web days. The workflow and output is not comparable, period. Print and web layout both have their respective inherent advantages and limitations. But I think it's self evident that, in general, a webpage is meant to have far more interactive features for a far bigger audience across a far bigger variety of devices than a print design. But I'm happy to see examples of PDFs that are the exception to this.

alxlaz 7y ago

It may not possible, but that doesn't mean the HTML and CSS clusterfuck is anywhere near the level we'd have expected back in the 1990s. None of the tools we have today can hold a candle to a proper UI builder -- which would suffice for a lot of "progressive" web apps. Back In The Day (TM), with a proper UI builder (as seen in Visual Basic, C++ Builder, Qt Designer) I could build ten different versions of the same dialog, for ten different resolutions and aspect ratios, in about the same time it takes me to get a button to stay where I want it in CSS. And, by the way, the weirdness of the day -- and the capabilities of the tools -- shouldn't be underestimated! The good ones did proper relative positioning and alignment, supported various kinds of "flowing" layouts and so on. It wasn't uncommon to have to support all modes between 640x480@4 and 2048x1536@32, and basically no applications ran in full-screen mode, so you didn't have about a dozen resolutions and aspect ratios, you had pretty much an infinite number of combinations.

danso 7y ago
Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the generated HTML/CSS/JS that it generates, but don't services like Wix make it incredibly easy for a layperson to build a servicable and attractive UI? Again, I reiterate that the generated code is an absolute clusterfuck (even compared to what I remember Frontpage 99 making), but from what I can tell, the end-user never touches the generated raw code.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  Tools like the ones I mentioned weren't meant to allow a layperson to build an UI, they were meant to allow developers to build an UI. The experience hasn't degraded much for people who don't write code for a living, but it has degraded significantly for developers. FWIW, it's part of why I moved away from all this stuff, more than 15 years ago. I discovered a lot of other fun things computers could do (I got into embedded programming, operating systems, security etc.), and web development stopped being fun when we seriously continued digging the hole we were into instead of climbing out of it.
  - y4mi 7y ago

goatlover 7y ago

But the Flash Designer could accommodate more design complexity and would scale to different screen sizes. It's not impossible to build modern RAD tooling and layout designers. Even some of the ones existing on the web these days for end users aren't bad.

wruza 7y ago

“I don’t think it’s possible to have such breadth and size of userbase and use-cases without a non-trivial increase in build complexity.” But why? What in full-flexible geometry and linear problem solving prevents us to support diverse userbases or devices? I’m not speaking about throwing away accessibility support or using fixed-size medium. I’m simply asking for sane math-based rather than MSWord-based primitives.