8 ms·

Come on, you can't be serious about this. Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, HTML of plain simple text-only pag

Come on, you can't be serious about this. Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Yes, HTML of plain simple text-only pages is still pretty much the same, but most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors. Yes, companies presenting themselvses online profit of more capabilities. And yes, presenting ads is probably easier too. But if you think those changes were just made because of monetary greed, you could say the same about almost any technological advancement, like color photography, or electric cars, because all of these had a commercial side to them too.

_trampeltier 7y ago
A lot of todays websites are evil. Just today, I couldn't even mark and copy just simple plain-looking text.
- mypalmike 7y ago
  Holding ALT while highlighting in the browser will often allow you to select text that is otherwise overly JavaScript-ed.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
I am serious. Yes, it's true it's easier than ever to create sophisticated websites. But it's also true that almost all this sophistication delivers negative value to users - it distracts them, slows them down, and forces them to keep buying faster hardware. It doesn't have to be like this - but it currently is. It's not even just a problem of explicit business incentives - the technical side of the industry has been compromised. The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity.
- ppod 7y ago
  The mistake you are making is that you are trying to answer the question of what the average user wants by looking at what you want. Developers are not representative of users.
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    A faster horse. People value privacy when made aware of the issue, but very few people are aware of how websites track (and manipulate) them.
    - UncleMeat 7y ago
      I feel like this claim needs support. All of the studies I'm aware of that ask people to choose between different price points based on privacy end up showing minimal valuing of privacy.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        GP's claims and the studies you mention are about two different things. GP claimed that users aren't generally aware of the extent their privacy is violated, and not that they would chose privacy over price if made aware.
      - kube-system 7y ago
        It is clear that many people know that many services they enjoy compromise their privacy. These stories have been covered by mainstream media ad nauseam. Jokes about privacy compromises are part of pop-culture at this point. Most people, however, are not enthusiasts or activists who are wholly invested in these topics. Even being aware of the issue, most act based on their immediate needs. Immediacy is an extremely important factor in decision-making. If we were to give this a utilitarian assessment formula: [severity of problem] * [immediacy of problem] <||> [importance of need] * [immediacy of need] Many people using social media to communicate with their family may evaluate that as: [100] * [1] < [100] * [100]
      - anoncake 7y ago
        There's a difference between valuing privacy and being willing to pay an extortion fee.
      - pnako 7y ago
        Did those studies gave the big picture about privacy? Why is it that people working in the field tend to be paranoid about privacy, and people outside are not? It can't be that we are just on average more paranoid. It's more likely that we know exactly how this data can be aggregated, stored forever, analysed in the future with capabilities that don't exist yet, etc. I think most people don't understand privacy in those terms.
- adiabatty 7y ago
  > The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity. What are you seeing that leads you to think this? The ads and engagement drivers (autoplaying videos of other content on the site) on sites that need eyeballs to keep the lights on, or the articles showing how to download the minimum usable assets so you don't waste the user's bandwidth, battery, and disk space[1]? The latter is what I tend to see when I'm looking at pages describing "best practice". 1: https://alistapart.com/article/request-with-intent-caching-strategies-in-the-age-of-pwas/ https://alistapart.com/article/request-with-intent-caching-s...
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    The best practices that encourage you to minimize content and maximize whitespace on your screen. To change text for icons. To hijack the scrollbar. To replace perfectly good default controls with custom alternatives that look prettier, but lose most of the ergonomic features the default controls provided. To favor infinite scrolling. Etc. Some "best practices" articles discourage all this, but in my experience, that's ignored. The trend is in ever decreasing density. It all makes sense if you consider apps following the practices I mention as sales drivers and ad delivery vectors. Putting aside the ethical issues of building such things, my issue is that people take practices developed for marketing material, and reapply them to tools they build, without giving it any second thought.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  This sounds like the kind of argument that would have said that the algorithm for rounded rectangles in the Mac OS toolbox was superfluous fluff. The world is bigger and more interesting than screens and screens of uninterrupted plaintext.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Rounding rectangles is superfluous fluff, but it also is nice, and serves a purpose in the context of the whole design language they're using. I'm not against rounding rectangles and other such UI fluff in general. But I am against throwing away perfectly working controls, with all the ergonomy their offer, and replacing it with a half-broken, slower version of that control that only works if you use it in one particular way, but hey, it has rounded rectangles now.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Sounds like you're against bad dynamic HTML then. Fortunately, good dynamic HTML also exists. And I wouldn't write off rounded rectangles as superfluous fluff. They're fairly ubiquitous in user interface design because round cornered structures are fairly common in nature. They make a UI look more "real". And decreasing the artificiality of a user interface isn't superfluous; it lets more users interoperate with the interface without feeling like they've strapped an alien abstraction onto themselves. A lot of people in the computer engineering space have no trouble working with alien abstractions for hours at a time, but it's an extremely self-selecting group. We are often at risk of believing that what is normal for us should feel normal for everybody. https://bgr.com/2016/05/17/iphone-design-rounded-squares-explanation/ https://bgr.com/2016/05/17/iphone-design-rounded-squares-exp...
castlecrasher2 7y ago
>most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors Are you sure this is the case? Because I think it may be a shiny object trap, where on first view a visually fancy site is great and appealing but in the long run a simple, fast-loading site is preferable.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
> most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors. You're aware that pure HTML and CSS alone can produce visually fancy content with pictures and colors, right? It honestly seems like a lot of web developers are starting to forget this, but it's true, I swear. My personal web site (https://coyotetracks.org/ https://coyotetracks.org/) is minimalist by design, but it has accent colors, custom fonts, Retina-ready images, and that silly little fade in and out when you hover over links, all without any JavaScript whatsoever. Also: turns out it works pretty well on Lynx! I think JS gets a bit of a bad rap these days and am willing to leap to its defense even though I don't like it much as a language, but a huge chunk of the reason it has a bad rap is because people do bad things with it, by which I mean either malicious things or just unnecessary things. An awful lot of modern web sites could run just fine with far, far fewer scripts than they're deploying. (And, yes, I can even do web analytics without JavaScript, because there are these things called "server logs" I can analyze with utilities like GoAccess.)
- juststeve 7y ago
  Your site is nice and fast
mike_hock 7y ago
Sure, new technologies have changed things for the better. Sophisticated web pages should be created when sophisticated web pages are necessary. Sophisticated web pages are not necessary to disseminate text-only context. 90's HTML is perfectly capable of doing that. I have no problem with loading 30MB of JS libraries into the browser for an application that actually does something. I have a problem with loading 30MB of shit to read 10kB worth of news.
zeveb 7y ago
I think he was serious, and I agree with him — and I believe that most users don’t want the majority of what JavaScript-laden pages offer over clean HTML-only pages.
grawprog 7y ago
>Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. And still average people aren't taking advantage of this and creating their own websites because despite it being massively easier, the way the web is now has pushed it still beyond the average person's reach. If these 'sophisticated' stacks and technologies weren't the norm and instead the web was more focused on being s place where.the average person can easily put up their own fancy looking simple webpage maybe we wouldn't be so dominated by these massive companies that have become the gatekeepers by providing limited platforms for people to do what did used to be a relatively easy thing even back in the day. There's a reason these companies fund and push these technology stacks, it gives them huge control over the internet and in the end, they don't really do anything fundamentally different than what good old fashioned HTML and CSS can do. Hell especially the HTML of today.
dmos62 7y ago
> Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Well if talking progress, we can also compare, say, energy efficiency of information transmission, or the number of well maintained Web clients. That doesn't look so good, does it? The question is what problem are we solving, or, in your words, what is "sophistication"? According to some measures we did achieve impressive things. But a lot of us experience heartache, because we think we didn't do all that well.
jcelerier 7y ago
is it now ? my parents whom were 100% tech illiterate were able to put up a moderately complex website with frontpage in 1996 without touching a single line of code and with a 100% custom look. Would they be able to do the same today with current tech stacks ? Not so sure...
jbverschoor 7y ago
It's actually because we programmers like to recreate things, because there's this itch and wonder about how stuff works. Http hasn't changed that much. Html did. It was hyper text, and rendering was done for document flow. Then we could script a bit, and soon after we wanted "webapplications". Now, we lost probably 15 years trying to fit in an application-ui and lifecycle model in a document-flow model. Html, or rather xml, or rather trees, are a good way to represent a user interface. Unfortunately back then, the only languages available were C++ and Java for any proper work oh yeah, and visual basic!). Javascript, php, and perl were a godsend in terms of productivity. Just like the 80s home computers and basic. It just worked. Type and run. This is also why bad badsoftware gets popular btw.. Coming back to the post.. Lynx renders HTML how it was intended: as a document.
- danShumway 7y ago
  There's little value in me doing this, but I always have to push back against this idea. This is the hill I'll die on. Most application UIs are not complicated. Most applications are just interactive documents. There is nothing special about 90% of the apps I use on my native computer that means they couldn't be rendered as HTML. The document model is fine for applications. Preferable, even. Heck, a reasonable portion of the native applications on my computer have optional pure-terminal interfaces. If your application can work in a terminal, it can work with HTML -- and embracing a document model for your application UI would be a better user experience than whatever the heck pixel-perfect framework that everyone is chasing nowadays. That's true on the web, and it's true on native. The problem with the web is not that HTML is incapable of being used as an application platform; it's not that we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's that both web and native developers overestimate the interface requirements of their applications, and bring in unnecessary cruft to achieve pixel-perfect layouts that are worse for end-users. We have a square peg, and a square hole, but we like to go to conferences and pretend that our peg is actually some convoluted, recursive star shape.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Thank you for writing this. I had this feeling that the document model isn't that bad for software in the first place (a feeling that I noticed when I prototyped some of the stuff I was working on in Observable, and realized the prototype in an interactive notebook format fits the problem more than the SPA we were building). But I haven't considered the implications. You might be very right that the document model could support a lot more than we give it credit for, if we just stopped pushing the established "appliance" UI paradigm.
boomlinde 7y ago
The crux of the problem is that the page in this doesn't need to be sophisticated. It lists result links from top to bottom. Things afforded by JavaScript that may enhance the interface like autoloading the next page of results can be made progressively. In particular, "visually fancier" content doesn't necessarily happen at the expense of accessibility with limited browsers. That's the point of CSS. That is really the fault of "modern web", that web pages are more "sophisticated" than they really need to be to present the information they contain in a visually pleasing and usable manner. There are so many round-about approaches to the problem that people don't concern themselves with the most straight forward one. I can't say that it's somehow massively easier to create a simple list of links with some excerpt in a way that it doesn't work on a 15 year old browser than it is to create one that doesn't. You really have to go out of your way to break something as simple and fundamental as linking.

_trampeltier 7y ago

A lot of todays websites are evil. Just today, I couldn't even mark and copy just simple plain-looking text.

mypalmike 7y ago
Holding ALT while highlighting in the browser will often allow you to select text that is otherwise overly JavaScript-ed.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

I am serious. Yes, it's true it's easier than ever to create sophisticated websites. But it's also true that almost all this sophistication delivers negative value to users - it distracts them, slows them down, and forces them to keep buying faster hardware. It doesn't have to be like this - but it currently is. It's not even just a problem of explicit business incentives - the technical side of the industry has been compromised. The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity.

ppod 7y ago
The mistake you are making is that you are trying to answer the question of what the average user wants by looking at what you want. Developers are not representative of users.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  A faster horse. People value privacy when made aware of the issue, but very few people are aware of how websites track (and manipulate) them.
  - UncleMeat 7y ago
    I feel like this claim needs support. All of the studies I'm aware of that ask people to choose between different price points based on privacy end up showing minimal valuing of privacy.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      GP's claims and the studies you mention are about two different things. GP claimed that users aren't generally aware of the extent their privacy is violated, and not that they would chose privacy over price if made aware.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      It is clear that many people know that many services they enjoy compromise their privacy. These stories have been covered by mainstream media ad nauseam. Jokes about privacy compromises are part of pop-culture at this point. Most people, however, are not enthusiasts or activists who are wholly invested in these topics. Even being aware of the issue, most act based on their immediate needs. Immediacy is an extremely important factor in decision-making. If we were to give this a utilitarian assessment formula: [severity of problem] * [immediacy of problem] <||> [importance of need] * [immediacy of need] Many people using social media to communicate with their family may evaluate that as: [100] * [1] < [100] * [100]
    - anoncake 7y ago
      There's a difference between valuing privacy and being willing to pay an extortion fee.
    - pnako 7y ago
      Did those studies gave the big picture about privacy? Why is it that people working in the field tend to be paranoid about privacy, and people outside are not? It can't be that we are just on average more paranoid. It's more likely that we know exactly how this data can be aggregated, stored forever, analysed in the future with capabilities that don't exist yet, etc. I think most people don't understand privacy in those terms.
adiabatty 7y ago
> The "best practices" in web development and user experience all deoptimize end-user ergonomy and productivity. What are you seeing that leads you to think this? The ads and engagement drivers (autoplaying videos of other content on the site) on sites that need eyeballs to keep the lights on, or the articles showing how to download the minimum usable assets so you don't waste the user's bandwidth, battery, and disk space[1]? The latter is what I tend to see when I'm looking at pages describing "best practice". 1: https://alistapart.com/article/request-with-intent-caching-strategies-in-the-age-of-pwas/ https://alistapart.com/article/request-with-intent-caching-s...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  The best practices that encourage you to minimize content and maximize whitespace on your screen. To change text for icons. To hijack the scrollbar. To replace perfectly good default controls with custom alternatives that look prettier, but lose most of the ergonomic features the default controls provided. To favor infinite scrolling. Etc. Some "best practices" articles discourage all this, but in my experience, that's ignored. The trend is in ever decreasing density. It all makes sense if you consider apps following the practices I mention as sales drivers and ad delivery vectors. Putting aside the ethical issues of building such things, my issue is that people take practices developed for marketing material, and reapply them to tools they build, without giving it any second thought.
shadowgovt 7y ago
This sounds like the kind of argument that would have said that the algorithm for rounded rectangles in the Mac OS toolbox was superfluous fluff. The world is bigger and more interesting than screens and screens of uninterrupted plaintext.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Rounding rectangles is superfluous fluff, but it also is nice, and serves a purpose in the context of the whole design language they're using. I'm not against rounding rectangles and other such UI fluff in general. But I am against throwing away perfectly working controls, with all the ergonomy their offer, and replacing it with a half-broken, slower version of that control that only works if you use it in one particular way, but hey, it has rounded rectangles now.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Sounds like you're against bad dynamic HTML then. Fortunately, good dynamic HTML also exists. And I wouldn't write off rounded rectangles as superfluous fluff. They're fairly ubiquitous in user interface design because round cornered structures are fairly common in nature. They make a UI look more "real". And decreasing the artificiality of a user interface isn't superfluous; it lets more users interoperate with the interface without feeling like they've strapped an alien abstraction onto themselves. A lot of people in the computer engineering space have no trouble working with alien abstractions for hours at a time, but it's an extremely self-selecting group. We are often at risk of believing that what is normal for us should feel normal for everybody. https://bgr.com/2016/05/17/iphone-design-rounded-squares-explanation/ https://bgr.com/2016/05/17/iphone-design-rounded-squares-exp...

castlecrasher2 7y ago

>most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors Are you sure this is the case? Because I think it may be a shiny object trap, where on first view a visually fancy site is great and appealing but in the long run a simple, fast-loading site is preferable.

chipotle_coyote 7y ago

> most users actually prefer visually fancier content with pictures and colors. You're aware that pure HTML and CSS alone can produce visually fancy content with pictures and colors, right? It honestly seems like a lot of web developers are starting to forget this, but it's true, I swear. My personal web site (https://coyotetracks.org/ https://coyotetracks.org/) is minimalist by design, but it has accent colors, custom fonts, Retina-ready images, and that silly little fade in and out when you hover over links, all without any JavaScript whatsoever. Also: turns out it works pretty well on Lynx! I think JS gets a bit of a bad rap these days and am willing to leap to its defense even though I don't like it much as a language, but a huge chunk of the reason it has a bad rap is because people do bad things with it, by which I mean either malicious things or just unnecessary things. An awful lot of modern web sites could run just fine with far, far fewer scripts than they're deploying. (And, yes, I can even do web analytics without JavaScript, because there are these things called "server logs" I can analyze with utilities like GoAccess.)

juststeve 7y ago
Your site is nice and fast

mike_hock 7y ago

Sure, new technologies have changed things for the better. Sophisticated web pages should be created when sophisticated web pages are necessary. Sophisticated web pages are not necessary to disseminate text-only context. 90's HTML is perfectly capable of doing that. I have no problem with loading 30MB of JS libraries into the browser for an application that actually does something. I have a problem with loading 30MB of shit to read 10kB worth of news.

zeveb 7y ago

I think he was serious, and I agree with him — and I believe that most users don’t want the majority of what JavaScript-laden pages offer over clean HTML-only pages.

grawprog 7y ago

>Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. And still average people aren't taking advantage of this and creating their own websites because despite it being massively easier, the way the web is now has pushed it still beyond the average person's reach. If these 'sophisticated' stacks and technologies weren't the norm and instead the web was more focused on being s place where.the average person can easily put up their own fancy looking simple webpage maybe we wouldn't be so dominated by these massive companies that have become the gatekeepers by providing limited platforms for people to do what did used to be a relatively easy thing even back in the day. There's a reason these companies fund and push these technology stacks, it gives them huge control over the internet and in the end, they don't really do anything fundamentally different than what good old fashioned HTML and CSS can do. Hell especially the HTML of today.

dmos62 7y ago

> Creating sophisticated web pages is massively easier than 10 or 20 years ago. Well if talking progress, we can also compare, say, energy efficiency of information transmission, or the number of well maintained Web clients. That doesn't look so good, does it? The question is what problem are we solving, or, in your words, what is "sophistication"? According to some measures we did achieve impressive things. But a lot of us experience heartache, because we think we didn't do all that well.

jcelerier 7y ago

is it now ? my parents whom were 100% tech illiterate were able to put up a moderately complex website with frontpage in 1996 without touching a single line of code and with a 100% custom look. Would they be able to do the same today with current tech stacks ? Not so sure...

jbverschoor 7y ago

It's actually because we programmers like to recreate things, because there's this itch and wonder about how stuff works. Http hasn't changed that much. Html did. It was hyper text, and rendering was done for document flow. Then we could script a bit, and soon after we wanted "webapplications". Now, we lost probably 15 years trying to fit in an application-ui and lifecycle model in a document-flow model. Html, or rather xml, or rather trees, are a good way to represent a user interface. Unfortunately back then, the only languages available were C++ and Java for any proper work oh yeah, and visual basic!). Javascript, php, and perl were a godsend in terms of productivity. Just like the 80s home computers and basic. It just worked. Type and run. This is also why bad badsoftware gets popular btw.. Coming back to the post.. Lynx renders HTML how it was intended: as a document.

danShumway 7y ago
There's little value in me doing this, but I always have to push back against this idea. This is the hill I'll die on. Most application UIs are not complicated. Most applications are just interactive documents. There is nothing special about 90% of the apps I use on my native computer that means they couldn't be rendered as HTML. The document model is fine for applications. Preferable, even. Heck, a reasonable portion of the native applications on my computer have optional pure-terminal interfaces. If your application can work in a terminal, it can work with HTML -- and embracing a document model for your application UI would be a better user experience than whatever the heck pixel-perfect framework that everyone is chasing nowadays. That's true on the web, and it's true on native. The problem with the web is not that HTML is incapable of being used as an application platform; it's not that we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's that both web and native developers overestimate the interface requirements of their applications, and bring in unnecessary cruft to achieve pixel-perfect layouts that are worse for end-users. We have a square peg, and a square hole, but we like to go to conferences and pretend that our peg is actually some convoluted, recursive star shape.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Thank you for writing this. I had this feeling that the document model isn't that bad for software in the first place (a feeling that I noticed when I prototyped some of the stuff I was working on in Observable, and realized the prototype in an interactive notebook format fits the problem more than the SPA we were building). But I haven't considered the implications. You might be very right that the document model could support a lot more than we give it credit for, if we just stopped pushing the established "appliance" UI paradigm.

boomlinde 7y ago

The crux of the problem is that the page in this doesn't need to be sophisticated. It lists result links from top to bottom. Things afforded by JavaScript that may enhance the interface like autoloading the next page of results can be made progressively. In particular, "visually fancier" content doesn't necessarily happen at the expense of accessibility with limited browsers. That's the point of CSS. That is really the fault of "modern web", that web pages are more "sophisticated" than they really need to be to present the information they contain in a visually pleasing and usable manner. There are so many round-about approaches to the problem that people don't concern themselves with the most straight forward one. I can't say that it's somehow massively easier to create a simple list of links with some excerpt in a way that it doesn't work on a 15 year old browser than it is to create one that doesn't. You really have to go out of your way to break something as simple and fundamental as linking.