5 ms·
People don't want to just "see the content". If you want that, you can just fire up links/elinks/lynx; it, surprisingly, works fairly well even today. But eve
by runn1ng 14y ago
People don't want to just "see the content".
If you want that, you can just fire up links/elinks/lynx; it, surprisingly, works fairly well even today.
But even the writer of the article didn't want to just see the text - she wants to see the shoes and decide which one to buy. You don't want to see a table with shoes numbers, descriptions and prices when you are shopping; visuals are important, too.
That's why noone is actually using text-only browsers.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoGopher supports images.
- effigies 14y agoIf you turn off Javascript and cookies, a ton of sites that serve what at least could be static content and which you don't need to log into simply stop working. What happened to graceful degradation? Is it not agile enough to expect a server to be able to work at least minimally with any browser?
- johnchristopher 14y agoIt is my belief graceful degradation got discarded when the "ditch ie6 movement" began to get full over-blown coverage.
- glesica 14y agoShe wanted to "see the content". The "content" just included images as well as text. What she didn't want was the heavy interface. Maybe a new content type would work... "text/html" would be the application and "text/static-html" would be "just the content"? Browsers would then just have a toggle option of some sort.
- terangdom 14y agoWhat about XML for content and XSLT for display? User could use a variety of XSLTs depending on constraints, viewing conditions.
- effigies 14y agoThe issue isn't what format the content is in, but that it's retrieved through client-side logic rather than as part of the query response. Also, what's wrong with HTML/CSS that is in any way resolved by XML/XSLT? I'm genuinely curious why somebody would put their content into a format with no default, well-understood display semantics.
- terangdom 14y agoMaybe I misunderstood how the xml/xslt-paradigm works, but my idea was that you have a serverside api serving up raw data, and the display is controlled by some code on the clientside that can be easily customised. So the server could serve up something like <shoe> <images> <image>foo.com/x.jpg</image> <image>foo.com/y.jpg</image> </images> <description>This shoe is very advanced bla bla bla</description> <fancyintroanimation>foo.com/intro1.swf</fancyintroanimation> </shoe> <shoe> .... and the client could use the default xslt if they were happy with that, and a custom otherwise.
- alecperkins 14y agoOr, the designers/developers can make sensible decisions about what to include. The existing tools are fine, and provide plenty of techniques for optimizing to different viewing platforms and environments. The problem is people getting carried away with the whiz-bang stuff that's possible, while ignoring degradation. I can't imagine how XML/XSLT would be any better.
- glesica 14y agoReplying to myself to clarify that I wasn't really being serious. Certainly it would be nice to be able to tell arbitrary web sites "no interface, just human-friendly information". But since they'd all have to implement that, it really wouldn't work better than what is already possible. This whole thing seems like a Macromedia redux of sorts. Web devs suddenly have a bunch of new tools to play with and some of them go nuts and do stupid things we'll all laugh about in 5-10 years. Of course in 5-10 years there will be something else for short-sighted marketers to abuse...
- cookingrobot 14y agoHere's an experiment with showing "just the content" http://www.shopobot.com/shop http://www.shopobot.com/shop Online stores show so little of what they're actually selling - we wanted to try stripping out everything that isn't the products. (using shoes from Amazon as the example here)
- huggyface 14y agoPeople don't want to just "see the content". That is presumptuous: Most users have zero choice in the matter.
- Domenic_S 14y agoUsers have a choice: they go to another web site.
- huggyface 14y agoSo if I like the content of site A, but not the presentation of site A, my choice regarding the presentation is to visit site B? I think you're confused and you aren't really keeping up with the conversation.
- Domenic_S 14y agoTouchy, touchy. In the context of the OP, if the user liked the shoes but not the website, she could order them on Zappos (for example) instead.