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The original computing vision, the Mother of All Demos, was philosophically against designing text in the ways of the obsolete print medium. The focus was on in
by Detrus 12y ago
The original computing vision, the Mother of All Demos, was philosophically against designing text in the ways of the obsolete print medium. The focus was on inventing a new way of writing information altogether. Instead of having paragraphs go one after another as required by print, have maps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map of the argument, wikis etc. If we focused on this more, we might have reached a new level of communication efficiency by now.
Here we are arguing if we should let authors stylize text. Does this restyling of text help communicate more efficiently? Typically no, a long wall of text just needs to be set in a readable style.
Even this choice of presentation was supposed to be the reader's, not the author's. I do not care one bit about links appearing in a ♢ weird new way. Links should appear the same way, everywhere on the web. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com just needed some padding, nice font rendering, line spacing and you'd get Medium.
To the reader, Medium promises consistency of presentation that the rest of the web does not. That problem should really have been solved on the browser's end, by a style that applied to all articles, chosen by the user from existing templates.
The style should serve a functional purpose to the reader, be slower or faster to read, reduce eyestrain, etc.
The web was supposed to be more extreme than frozen pizza, more like astronaut's food paste. Skeuomorphic pizza in any form distracts users from the real purpose.
As far as Medium controlling your content, if the web was smarter you could put it somewhere else and the links would magically work. Centralization is a technically simple way to exploit a dumb network and the network should be fixed.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- RyanMcGreal 12y agoSidenote: at the bottom of the motherfuckingwebsite link is a link to a blogging tool called txti: http://txti.es/ http://txti.es/ You just type some stuff into the text box, submit the form and you've got a web page: http://txti.es/4t17s http://txti.es/4t17s It's remarkably similar to jottit, a tool built several years ago by the late Aaron Swartz: http://www.jottit.com/ http://www.jottit.com/ Exact same thing: you type some text into a text box, submit the form and you've got a web page: http://www.jottit.com/3bn7r/ http://www.jottit.com/3bn7r/
- jordanlev 12y agoSurely this is a matter of personal taste / opinion -- I actually prefer when different sites have different designs. For example, I don't like RSS readers that put all content into the same format, and prefer ones that just link to the articles so I can read things in the context of the site's design (as the author wants it, not me). And I think the diamonds next to the hyperlinks on this article is a neat design flourish (because it is still intuitive and usable... although admittedly most other designs that do away with the standard underlined text are a usability loss).
- Detrus 12y agoIt's a matter of philosophical taste. I like to look at fancy typography myself. But there is a time and place for that, which is a separate time from reading something for content. Unique designs serve a functional purpose, helping you remember where you read something, who authored it. That purpose can be served a different way. And philosophically, I'm not sure I should care about who wrote it. One author having a prettier template than another adds bias. A set of various authors using the same template can make the mediocre ones appear more trustworthy than mediocre authors using an ugly template. If I chose the template for everyone, I'd judge them by content faster, since I'd be used to the look and new pretty typography wouldn't distract me.