It's funny because in that Instagram thread, I just wrote a comment about how "beautiful" is the new "it just works"[1]. This post and the many like it are a direct backlash from that mindset, just as the Linux users mantra during "it just works" was "I can make it work better". It's a grab for control in a world where oftentimes your choices are limited. Everything is beautiful, and everything looks the same. What will be the new "beautiful"? I don't know. But I'll bet there will be a counter-culture there to espouse an alternative as well. Perhaps the new "beautiful" will be "content is simple". Time will tell.
this is exactly what i'm trying to accomplish with version 2 of one of my sites - although I still need the cms and all of that, i'm stripping away all the fancy colorful css, photos, etc... only keeping what I need.
minimalistic - let the content speak for the site, not the fancy design
So funny to me how people take the message so literally. Most people do not view the source of a webpage so a little script that doesn't affect the user experience is irrelevant to 99% of internet users. The message is about what you are presenting on the web...
I automatically checked the source after reading "There's not much code on this page at all, just simple markup for paragraphs, hierarchy, and emphasis." Just out of curiousity I guess. It's obviously not a big deal, it's just funny. It's not what I expected.
Part of the message of the text is about establishing connections — that someone reading the text the author wrote is "magical". The magic works both ways. The author should get to enjoy his analytics and "see" people reading his words. It's one of the great benefits of publishing on the web.
Here on HN, you occasionally find tl;dr near the top of a comment thread -- but it's followed by a nice summary of the article. Instead of expressing the rather worthless sentiment of "I didn't read this", it's expressing the far more valuable "if you're not sure you want to invest the time in reading this, here are the highlights of what you would have otherwise missed."
I totally agree, I don't read the comments for an explicit summary. I read the comments to see what opinions people have of the article, on the basis of the comments I determine if the article is worth reading.
I don't do this for all articles, but it is a pretty common occurrence.
Summary: the article claims that words are what makes the web what it is and that instead of being an after-thought in design they should be at the fore of web design. That words alone can convey a powerful [enough] message and so, it is intimated, minimal design is sufficient.
How did you do these measurements? I would be shocked if the entire gmail webapp is 7.2KB.
Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.
Still an order of magnitude faster than Reddit. Maybe I'm just a noob at programming and scaling, but after all the engineers Reddit hires, how are they still so slow and crashing?
The actual HN interface though isn't that readable (for me) though!
I read it with my own style - so that it is just words.
A few issues I have with it, is the contrast, the bright background, and when you zoom in, the text isn't fluid so soon flys out the side of the browser.
And I have to restyle most of the articles that are linked from HN so I can read them too.
Any article of any length ends up on my eReader - which is particularly no frills but readable.
I think this is a beautiful exposition of a powerful truth: words are magical, and we can now publish anything we want so that anyone who wants to can read it. That is amazing power, and it's available to almost anyone who is literate, in the developed world.
To be fair, in both cases I started with a simple text file on my computer. After that I send them as a plain-text email to friends for review. And then I publish on the fancy website.
I don't think there's anything wrong with pictures or colors.
"If that additional styling or image gives the audience more understanding - then add it."
At this point, I think I can experiment more with taking things out. Maybe that's where I'll start with my websites.
I changed the format of my blog many times. I came up with this http://www.minid.net and its pleasant to read even on phone. The readers love it and it loads lighting fast. I can say faster than OPs website.
I agree with him, and this is why I find Reddit, HN and some blogs I get to read around here (M. Gemmell's, M. Arment's, J. Gruber, PG) so good: they focus on the text, not on the fancy (and this nags me again to clear all cruft from my blog, but... some other day.)
PS: I kind of missed "all craftwardship is of the highest quality" in the page, though (or text that menaced with spikes of http or something.) I guess I'm too geeky today
Thanks for sharing this. I've been obsessing over so many new fancy effects using javascript and fancy CSS3 styling and getting held up about the technology, but you reminded me why I ever got into programming / web development in the first place. To share things with people all over the world. As a kid growing up on a tiny island that was a huge deal for me when I first started. I think some of the magic got lost over the years as I I focused more and more on the technical aspects but you've reminded me that sharing is important and the tech is just "syntactic sugar"
Why is there so much hate for Quartz on here? It may be hard to read on a mobile device, but if you focus on just the articles it is very distraction free and easy to read. Nit-picking is fine, but overly criticizing is stupid when qz.com is miles ahead of almost every other publishing outlet online.
Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation or more sites like traditional newspapers that throw 100 links, 10 ads, pop-us about related articles, and other crap at you?
Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation
I would expect something that's focused on the content would eliminate the top/side bars, and show me the actual content. Annoyingly, NoScript (which often makes newspapers' web sites quite tolerable) doesn't appear to remove qz.com's clutter.
I find quartz painful to interact with. I generally skip links once I realize they go to Quartz. The problem is that it tries so hard to be simple, but just isn't. It's actually just what the author of the article seems to have been thinking about.
For instance, the right-hand sidebar is totally pointless and serves no purpose other than to push the scroll bar into a weird position. The header at the top is just meaningless clutter. Why does the left side-bar need to exist? Why can't the links to other articles just scroll with the rest of the page (the '90s called, they want their frames back)?
Sure, Quartz is somewhat less cluttered than Huffpo, but Huffpo doesn't claim to be about simplicity, Quartz does, I find that infuriating.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my disdain for Quartz comes from the fact that following a Quartz link on the device I'm using at that moment seems to have a less than evens chance of delivering readable text.
For a site that's full of content, they make it hard to get that content. If they were failing at a hard problem, I'd be more sympathetic, but overcomplicating the business of putting text on a screen to that extent is just inexcusably narcissistic.
I don't know either. I really like qz.com, I just tried visiting it on my iPhone, articles are easy to read. The sidebar allows me to quickly find other content on the site. It's great.
First time [1] my in-laws saw "the web" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their travel guide was obsolete, I found a web page a student had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil.
I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and anyone could do that. It was like watching a Pachinko machine pay out a jackpot :-)
[1] It was circa Christmas 1994 since I was trying to explain to them what Java was and why I thought it might have an impact on the world.
That's a great anecdote. Out of curiosity, how did you find the site? I had just turned four at the time, so I don't quite remember what browsing the Internet was like then.
I don't know about the OP, but in 1994, I was mostly using Webcrawler as my search engine. Lycos came out around then too. Switched to Altavista pretty quickly after it came out.
In context, I was part of the group that would eventually become the Java group (at that time it had transitioned from being the Oak group to being the 'Liveoak' group[1]) Patrick Chan had written a web spider in Java, we marvelled that it seemed like it could visit every site on the web over night :-) But mostly what it found were the 'big' web sites (computer companies, early movers in the Internet space) and students who had downloaded X-mosaic and the httpd from CERN and were playing around with early HTML.
[1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)
In 1994, the main way you found websites was mostly from hub sites that maintained large libraries of links to other sites (like a directory), newsgroups (UUCP/Usenet), friends in IRC trading links, AOL, Delphi and Compuserve forums and print magazines. Webcrawler was revolutionary when it came on-line in 1994, but there were no comprehensive search engines that had a high index count until probably 1996.
The mother of all link directories started from NCSA who distributed the first web browser (Mosaic) and they ran a site where they would publish a monthly list of "What's New" on the web. They pulled the pages from their site a few years ago but fortunately I made a mirror on my server for historical reference that you can check out here:
I remember circa-1994/1995, our library got a book called something like "World Wide Web Yellow Pages" and it was a printed book of a couple hundred pages of curated web URLs. Even then the irony was not lost on me. Why didn't they just put it online? The answer was, well, then how would you find that?
Many sites, including most home pages (remember those?) had a page of links, a small curated set of links[1]. Ooh, and guestbooks! Thousands and thousands of guestbooks!
Because other people have given good answers, I just wanted to add.. the Web was so much better linked together back then. Prior to Altavista made searching useful most of the time, it was common to rely on jumping from one site to another through plentiful link pages, web rings, and lists of resources that people had put together. There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.
If we knew back then what is common knowledge today, we could build an early version of Google search in a few months. Web spider, parsing HTML, extracting links and text, computing Page Rank and then making an inverted index to look up info by keyword. Imagine this would have been 100 times better than Yahoo's links and Altavista's search.
By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
Web Rings were amazing though; found a great site about X-Files plot theories? -- no problem, chances are you'd find more that were like that by following the web ring. We lost something back then that, even today, we never really got back...
Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics.
I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.
I was at a computer camp sometime around '94, and the camp had a printed "Directory of web pages" which was exactly like the yellow pages of the phone book. You would look up a subject, and it had a printed list of urls on that subject.
I still have a copy of "The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog" published by O'Reilly in 1992. It has a whole section devoted to lists of addresses of sites grouped by subject. Many of the sites didn't have urls because they were operating over ftp or telnet or WAIS or Gopher.
I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names.
>There was also Usenet which people often posted links on and which was sorted by topic and a handy way to find stuff.
When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley.
I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."
Implying we should 'fix' Eternal September is pretty close to implying we should keep important technology out of the hands of those the current users deem unworthy. That prevents both spam and the Arab Spring, both 4chan and Wikileaks.
Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness.
It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
> Implying we should 'fix' Eternal September is pretty close to implying we should keep important technology out of the hands of those the current users deem unworthy. That prevents both spam and the Arab Spring, both 4chan and Wikileaks.
Not necessarily. The holy grail is growth where culture is preserved, i.e. the rate of acquisition of new users is below the point where they overwhelm the culture.
New users acculturate over time and exposure, so you can roughly model it as "at any time, no more than x% of the users should be 'new'".
That's still exponential growth, so it needn't be elitest. In time, you'll still get to everyone who wants in.
I don't know - you can try to be inclusive and also set some standards. That doesn't have to be for the entire Internet.
The future people will have fun comparing and contrasting different reputation systems and online communities. Assuming enough information stays for them to study.
Usenet was archived by Deja, which got bought by Google. It's in a sorry state, but at least it's stil there.
Who's archiving Reddit, or HN, or 4chan, or all the rest?
I agree with your argument. But I think the internet's strongest trait is not necessarily revolutionary changes (wikileaks and arab spring). The things that have been built on the internet have been incredible. Think of crowdsourced projects like wikipedia and how ridiculously trivial it is for a scientist (or someone like me; a student in a lab) to access information or search for experimental data (genes are the tip of the iceberg here).
I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.
I completely disagree with your statement. Maybe there is a bigger question: 'Is crossing the chasm to widespread adoption always a good thing?' Maybe we should be trying to build platforms that are high-quality instead of high-quantity. We are caught in a world that is obsessed with inclusion rather than exclusion. Is that, by necessity, the default position? Should it be?
The internet contributed to building support for the Arab Spring throughout the world but it was tyrannical regimes that were the root cause. Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism', a profession in which people would put their live's on the line to reveal scandals and uncover secrets they felt the world should have known.
Technology does not motivate moral growth. People motivate moral growth. Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world when they invaded Poland and set the course for World War II.
The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
> Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism',
We still do. And, historically, it never got us anything as important as cablegate.
> Technology does not motivate moral growth.
Technology enables moral growth by reducing the amount of morality-crushing cruelty we're exposed to on a daily basis and allowing our natural morality to flourish. It's easier to care about others when you haven't just lost your child to smallpox.
> Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world
They were, at best, on a par with the rest of the Western World, and, frankly, mismanaging themselves into defeat due to the very nature of their society.
The idolization of the Nazis as being so efficient and so advanced is due to what some Western observers thought before the war, when Hitler was using basic Keynesian-style pump-priming in the form of military spending to get the country out of the Depression, mixed with a few largely worthless wonder-weapons, such as the V2 rockets and the early jets, which did nothing to win the war.
> The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
This is true but it misses my point: Everyone can have their little niche space, which is amazing if you're not an upper-middle-class heterosexual cissexual white male who would have niche spaces anyway.
Gays can have spaces where being gay isn't weird. Trans people can have spaces where being trans doesn't mean you get your head kicked in. That kind of social interaction was pretty well impossible before the Internet, especially in places like Iran or Alabama, where advertising that you are 'a certain way' could be an invitation to violence.
The Internet is both a network of linked networks and a community of linked communities; both aspects are vital to what it is and what it can become.
Does anyone know why altavista.com and altavista.digital.com were different? I just remember preferring the digital.com version for some reason.
I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).
> everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful
Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.
The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic.
Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...
Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another.
What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.
Back in the day you bought magazines like ".NET" (a UK publication) that told you where the hotspots were on the web.
There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two".
Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time.
Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :)
Quick answer: links. Hypertext. It's important enough to the original vision of this whole contraption to actually be the name.
While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet.
Not just anybody. You had to have a publisher, and it took weeks to years to get a piece published. Which means nothing got published if there wasn't a chance at a monetary return. The web is a significant improvement if you ask me.
First time my in-laws saw "the book" they were trying to find information about vacation spots in Brazil but their grandpa's diaries were obsolete, I found a printed book a monk had written up about where the best places to stay and see were in Brazil.
I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and many people could do that. It was like looking into the darkness and suddenly seeing a firefly blinking :-)
...
My point here is, the printing press had it's impact, nobody denies that. Seeing the times changing is what leaved ChuckMcM's in-laws astounded.
One year away from being annoyed at the web to being blown away by yahoo.com. A friend searched for some game or something on yahoo and I was like what is the trickery?
Remember the search aggregators, like Magellan (maybe Columbus? Something like that) that searched X different engines and aggregated the results in a desktop app for you to use?
Then I found Google, and I never used anything else again.
That was Copernic. (After Copernicus) I remember using it and there was a list of perhaps 20 engines. I remember the first to return (like, would return in 1 second not 30 seconds for the rest) was google.
Every single time, google was the first back. It wasn't always ranked the top result back then, but it was fast.
Yes! That's it. Yeah, Google came and blew everything else out of the water. I remember searching for an ocx file for something that wouldn't run, and everything kept returning some spam sites. I somehow stumbled upon Google, after some recommendation, and tried it, and the first result was a legitimate download of the actual file.
That's what Dogpile did - at one point - albeit as a regular browser search engine, which was its allure to me. I often got better results than on Google, which must have been around their formative stages.
What is hipster about that? Your statement makes no sense.
I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"?
That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars.
If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster" than using Altavista. Gawd, I musta been and early hipster, how much more "hipster" can you get than that.
Between Altavista and Google, alltheweb.com (FAST Search) also had their day. I was in charge of a major web portal around 2001, and we were contracting out site search queries to FAST. One day I got a call from a new company named Google. The guy said he could give me a better price than FAST. I asked what price. He said, "Any price."
the FAST Search guys sold alltheweb.com to yahoo.com and focused on enterprise search (i.e. they sell/license their software to companies) with customers such as newspaper companies, yellow pages companies and government agencies. They were then acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and rolled into their Sharepoint offerings.
Dont forget northern light. It was a great search engine targeted at researchers and academics that grouped results in folders of topic areas. They made the unfortunate business decision to transition to a paid service right as google was becoming popular.
To have used Altavista or Dogpile one must have either been on the internet before it was cool, or made a deliberately retro choice of search engine. Either qualifies for hipsterdom.
Sure, simple text is fine for a blog. But if I'm selling something like a piece of art it's all about the images: large, high-quality images from multiple angles. Pinterest wouldn't be called minimalist, but it does a damn fine job of accomplishing its goals.
Design should help accomplish business (or personal) goals. We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma.
Is it not self-obvious that if every page attempting to serve up content similar to that in the OP (pictureless editorial), the web would be bleak and characterless?
Not debating the effectiveness of that kind of design, but rather pointing out the obviousness that this sort of anti-"always, ever" statement is easily validated.
Most of the web is awash in ugly junk. Whenever I go to a machine that doesn't have adblock, Ghostery etc., I am increasingly horrified. It's like a highway with so many billboards that you can't see the direction signs, never mind enjoy the view. That or some sort of infinite supermarket magazine rack.
I HATE the way web design has evolved. I want to make the design choices at my end, not have them imposed on me or consuming a ridiculous amount of bandwidth. Most of the design on the web is no good.
I don't find text to be bleak or characterless; if it needs design that badly, then it's not well-written. And judging by the audience for things like ReadItLater and so on, I'm not alone. I just want the option to read text the way I want, not how someone thinks I ought to be see it, which is more often about getting me to look that providing me with a comfortable reading experience.
Then style the web as you fit on your own browser, but don't try to impose your design sensibilities on mine. That's why I keep saying 'client side'. I prefer not to download and process most of the graphic cruft that I see, and vastly prefer reading articles in an RSS reader to visitng pages that remind me of being a shopping mall.
You are already able to do this; simply disable stylesheets or as you said use a reader app. We've already discussed using technology like adblocker.
Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own.
I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is itself a "design sensibility" as you term it.
I appreciate where you're coming from and I'm sorry if my earlier comments came off as snippy. But I do think the influence of design on the web has been too heavily tilted towards the publisher end and not enough towards enabling the consumer.
I have the skills and experience to retool my browsing experience for my more minimalist aesthetic, but most consumers experience the web as something more like an animated version of a supermarket checkout magazine. Since getting a smartphone a few years back, I've been especially struck by how much bandwidth is consumed on transmitting cruft on things like news stories, where the actual text is only a few kilobytes and relevant photographs take up no more than a few hundred kb; but after you pile on all the trackers, divs, ads, etc. etc. the page ends up being many megabytes and can easily take 30 seconds over a typical 3g connection.
To me that's enormously consumer-hostile to very little real publisher benefit; the more shit I have to download to see a page the less likely I am to consume news from that source and the more likely I am to reinforce my ad blockers etc. (whereas I will make exceptions for site that make restrained use of such things so they can get a little extra ad revenue or tracking data value in return for the service they provide).
"Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams."
I imagine a lot of users would love to have a web browser alternative or software extension that gave users complete creative control in an accessible way- including advertisements, colors, typography and margins.
I think such a software would have to be free, but I also believe it would change the way web design and advertising works if it caught on.
If every page was similar to this one, the web would be plainer and simpler. It seems that you seem to think this is a bad thing by characterizing it as "bleak and characterless." I think it would just be a whole lot less stupid :D.
Pretty much everything I read on my Kindle looks the same in terms of font, styling, etc. Far from being "bleak and characterless", it gets out the way and lets me read the story, which is what I'm there for.
I think the author clearly states: "Think about the words first, than the rest".
I didn't read it as a call to minimalism, more so as "It does not matter how flashy your site is, if in the end you have really nothing to say."
It's hard to disagree, honestly (it's also plain common sense, nothing groundbreaking, although the minimalist presentation really helps driving home the point).
If your content is pictures, the same philosophy applies: ditch any ornamentation that gets in the way, just post your damn pictures. If you're selling the pictures? Get the pictures out there and get the "buy" controls out there.
It's still minimalism, and all it's saying is: "if your goal is to show pictures, that fancy layout that pushes all your content into a slick grid of thumbnails, just so people can see some slick fly-out animation when they're clicked upon, is probably just wasting everyone's time."
Relying on words conflicts with the popular concept "show, don't tell". So I think the author's point only applies to a subset of web pages. From my perspective, I want to see screenshots of your app (or preferably try it with a non-signup demo) - I don't want to read a bleeding heart story about your motivation for it. Give me a tagline at best for that.
App web pages need to be designed like HyperCards or PowerPoint presentations - where you aim to lower the number of points on the screen to retain attention.
I can't speak for all designers, but when I design webpages, I do start with words. Typography and content serve as most the fundamental concerns when working toward a usable, visually stunning design.
If the thesis of this editorial is "add only which serves to aid in achieving the spec/goal", I agree. But there is an implicit danger here as well of underestimating the total needs of the resource's end user.
There's something magical about personal websites. Something that a Facebook profile page or a Twitter stream or a Tumblr will never reach. I really wish more people would go back to the earlier roots of the internet, and share what's on their mind in a more personal and genuine way.
I agree completely. Learning HTML was such an empowering feeling for me. You can make something fancy or minimal, whatever you feel like. We are all unique and personal websites show that much better than a social media website ever can IMHO
"Art of Travel"[1] is one of those websites.
When I read that website I was impressed how lovingly it was put together. The overall experience was so good that I didn't even think about evaluating its design.
I think you've got to question the definition of "web design". I'd argue that the text is framed content and is part of the design.
The post at least highlights that 'web design' is somewhat of a distraction.
There is so much (unnecessary?) labour involved in framing the content by posturing programmers (lost down some rabbit hole) and anal pixel pushers that you could easily forget that to many: the content is what matters.
Getting your head around HTML, publishing and hosting is still not that trivial. That's why people take to something like Facebook, or sharing photos via Instagram via their mobile phones.
That's not to detract from the beauty and the 'miracle' of web publishing.
I'm not obsessed with fancy designs and scripts. Have a look at my home page.
What I'm obsessed with is the fact every god damned web site on the internet includes google-analytics stuff! You would have made your point had you left it out.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadInteresting irony. ;)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5913461
minimalistic - let the content speak for the site, not the fancy design
I find it a bit ironical that a manifesto for minimalism still carries Google Analytics code to track people.
I also needed a web server to host them, an FTP client to transfer them, plus the entire infrastructure of the web to make this work. ;)
So beneath the simplicity of "just words" is some complexity.
But all that stuff is invisible for most people visiting the page. The point is that simple words on a page can be powerful and effective.
I'll often read the comments briefly first before deciding if I want to read an article.
I don't do this for all articles, but it is a pretty common occurrence.
Too lazy; didn't hire
His blog, e.g. http://justinjackson.ca/the-principle-that-changed-my-life/, seems to follow pretty mainstream design ideas.
http://consc.net/misc/moser.html
http://ia.net/blog/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period
One of my favorite of Hofstadter's essays. And thanks for your links.
edit: the most surprising is gmail.com for me, id have thought they load tons of js in the background. but maybe so does hn?
Just looking at the Network tab in Chrome's inspector, I see a lot more than 7KB being transferred. It seems the main page on gmail is just loading the other j.s. files.
edit: OK so in Incognito Mode i got 17KB which is a bit more believable, but why doesnt it show that in normal mode with disabled cache?
The largest file I see is the ?shva=1 /mail/u/0 file, clocking in at 173KB.
Just think — we treat text as our user interface!
High quality content + focus on readability = bliss.
I read it with my own style - so that it is just words.
A few issues I have with it, is the contrast, the bright background, and when you zoom in, the text isn't fluid so soon flys out the side of the browser.
And I have to restyle most of the articles that are linked from HN so I can read them too.
Any article of any length ends up on my eReader - which is particularly no frills but readable.
I'm thinking of doing a redesign. ;)
To be fair, in both cases I started with a simple text file on my computer. After that I send them as a plain-text email to friends for review. And then I publish on the fancy website.
I don't think there's anything wrong with pictures or colors.
"If that additional styling or image gives the audience more understanding - then add it."
At this point, I think I can experiment more with taking things out. Maybe that's where I'll start with my websites.
PS: I kind of missed "all craftwardship is of the highest quality" in the page, though (or text that menaced with spikes of http or something.) I guess I'm too geeky today
Would you rather see more sites like qz.com that focus on content and navigation or more sites like traditional newspapers that throw 100 links, 10 ads, pop-us about related articles, and other crap at you?
I would expect something that's focused on the content would eliminate the top/side bars, and show me the actual content. Annoyingly, NoScript (which often makes newspapers' web sites quite tolerable) doesn't appear to remove qz.com's clutter.
For instance, the right-hand sidebar is totally pointless and serves no purpose other than to push the scroll bar into a weird position. The header at the top is just meaningless clutter. Why does the left side-bar need to exist? Why can't the links to other articles just scroll with the rest of the page (the '90s called, they want their frames back)?
Sure, Quartz is somewhat less cluttered than Huffpo, but Huffpo doesn't claim to be about simplicity, Quartz does, I find that infuriating.
For a site that's full of content, they make it hard to get that content. If they were failing at a hard problem, I'd be more sympathetic, but overcomplicating the business of putting text on a screen to that extent is just inexcusably narcissistic.
I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and anyone could do that. It was like watching a Pachinko machine pay out a jackpot :-)
[1] It was circa Christmas 1994 since I was trying to explain to them what Java was and why I thought it might have an impact on the world.
[1] The name was a somewhat morbid joke on James Gosling's part as Sun was cancelling the Java project at the end of the fiscal year and had been split into the "part that the hardware guys liked" (Sun Interactive) and "the part no one knew what to do with." (Liveoak)
The mother of all link directories started from NCSA who distributed the first web browser (Mosaic) and they ran a site where they would publish a monthly list of "What's New" on the web. They pulled the pages from their site a few years ago but fortunately I made a mirror on my server for historical reference that you can check out here:
http://www.kitchencloset.com/realstuff/ncsa/whats_new-archiv...
Enjoy!
edit: forgot to mention web rings someone else just mentioned.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/19991022011955/http://www.geociti...
By the way, syntax highlight thinks "Altavista" is a spelling error. Talk about becoming the footnote of history. Google was the company that took the lead from AV and now Google's own browser can't understand their main competitor of 10 years ago. AV did it to themselves, putting all that shit on the homepage and not providing good results. LOL
Even after Altavista was clearly better than Yahoo for ad-hoc searches, I still used Yahoo a lot because their topic hierarchy was a really great way to sit down and learn about some topic and its sub-topics.
I was particularly keen on this while eating because you could browse the web with just the mouse very easily.
I just checked and the terms "google", "altavista", and "search engine" do not appear anywhere in the index. Also, no weird web2.0-style domain names.
Different times.
When my college roommate showed me how to download a graduate student's thesis from Usenet, I thought my head was going to explode I thought it was so cool. Here I am, halfway across the country, and I can download, read and cite some grad student's paper from the University of California Berkeley.
I now feel like a guy who grew up during the 1950's when you tell kids, "Yeah, the internet wasn't always about Reddit and Porn kiddies."
The technology changes but we seem to keep reinventing the wheel every time the cart gets overcrowded.
Keeping the Internet as it was prior to 1991, when commercial access was first allowed, means keeping it a small, controlled entity with obvious choke points that make it trivial to censor or kill entirely. It largely prevents its use for social or political change other than the kinds of change its owners want to see. It would trivialize the Internet by relegating it to a tiny fraction of its current usefulness.
It's easy to idealize what we had. However, losing sight of what we have now, and what we could have, is actively harmful to the prospect of future moral growth.
Not necessarily. The holy grail is growth where culture is preserved, i.e. the rate of acquisition of new users is below the point where they overwhelm the culture.
New users acculturate over time and exposure, so you can roughly model it as "at any time, no more than x% of the users should be 'new'".
That's still exponential growth, so it needn't be elitest. In time, you'll still get to everyone who wants in.
Making it work tho, that's the rub :-)
The future people will have fun comparing and contrasting different reputation systems and online communities. Assuming enough information stays for them to study.
Usenet was archived by Deja, which got bought by Google. It's in a sorry state, but at least it's stil there.
Who's archiving Reddit, or HN, or 4chan, or all the rest?
I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.
The internet contributed to building support for the Arab Spring throughout the world but it was tyrannical regimes that were the root cause. Wikileaks is not new. We used to have a little thing called 'investigative journalism', a profession in which people would put their live's on the line to reveal scandals and uncover secrets they felt the world should have known.
Technology does not motivate moral growth. People motivate moral growth. Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world when they invaded Poland and set the course for World War II.
The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
We still do. And, historically, it never got us anything as important as cablegate.
> Technology does not motivate moral growth.
Technology enables moral growth by reducing the amount of morality-crushing cruelty we're exposed to on a daily basis and allowing our natural morality to flourish. It's easier to care about others when you haven't just lost your child to smallpox.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
> Nazi Germany was the most technologically advanced society in the world
They were, at best, on a par with the rest of the Western World, and, frankly, mismanaging themselves into defeat due to the very nature of their society.
The idolization of the Nazis as being so efficient and so advanced is due to what some Western observers thought before the war, when Hitler was using basic Keynesian-style pump-priming in the form of military spending to get the country out of the Depression, mixed with a few largely worthless wonder-weapons, such as the V2 rockets and the early jets, which did nothing to win the war.
> The reality is that we are segmenting ourselves from other internet users just by taking part in the HN community. Most people here would admit, the minute HN would spread to the point of being widely adopted, we would all leave. I don't come to HN to be inundated with cat pictures. I'm here because I learn things every time I visit a link posted on HN.
This is true but it misses my point: Everyone can have their little niche space, which is amazing if you're not an upper-middle-class heterosexual cissexual white male who would have niche spaces anyway.
Gays can have spaces where being gay isn't weird. Trans people can have spaces where being trans doesn't mean you get your head kicked in. That kind of social interaction was pretty well impossible before the Internet, especially in places like Iran or Alabama, where advertising that you are 'a certain way' could be an invitation to violence.
The Internet is both a network of linked networks and a community of linked communities; both aspects are vital to what it is and what it can become.
I wish I could go back in time to 1996... everything on the internet seemed so much more meaningful, not to mention textual (because images took so long to download).
Back then it almost felt like we were in the heroic age of internet communities, to borrow a phrase used about a period of American inventors. It'll never be like that again, but there are more good things coming in the future.
The sheer amount of information back then was nothing compared to what it was today, but it was so much easier to browse around. Something as trivial as a webring was a cement for a community rather than a pledge for traffic.
Despite the nostalgia, I do think that, overall, the WWW experience has mostly gotten better since then, if only for the amount of information and communication. However, the density of quality has rather shrunk...
Web pages were static, many were long-form, they tended to provide information, and link copiously to one another.
What they lacked was collaborative editing, though Ward Cunningham was already working on that at the time. Wikis postdated the Web only by a brief bit.
There were other physical publications like the "Internet White Pages" or some such thing (no seriously) which I remember seeing in UK bookshops and thinking "that's gonna be outa date in a week or two".
Back then you felt you could contain all of the websites (or pointer sites) in your head. It was truly an exciting and exploratory time.
Oh and I forgot, using KA9Q [1] for your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.1, because Microsoft had't quite caught up at that point. And hacking the UK's PSS network to find your way into a university that was connected so you could access usenet. And the early days of Demon Internet in the UK....oh the nostalgia of it all :)
[1]: http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/
http://i.imgur.com/1n6mH4N.jpg
[1]: http://i.imgur.com/HxDWs9c.jpg [2]: http://amzn.com/1568843003
While were reminiscing... In 1994, the web felt like technology. You typed in "http://" and it felt exotic. You were connecting to a server. Literally: _a_ server. You wondered what would happen if you hit the same address with gopher or (more likely) telnet.
As often as not, something would happen.
To me, the web is just the next step in the improvement in the publishing of the written word. I don't see it as different than a book.
I could almost see the dots connect when they realized that someone they didn't know, in Brazil, had written up a piece of information at some point that they were now seeing and using, and many people could do that. It was like looking into the darkness and suddenly seeing a firefly blinking :-)
...
My point here is, the printing press had it's impact, nobody denies that. Seeing the times changing is what leaved ChuckMcM's in-laws astounded.
Edit: OMG it's still alive..
Then I found Google, and I never used anything else again.
Every single time, google was the first back. It wasn't always ranked the top result back then, but it was fast.
It's not hard to see why everyone switched to it.
I'm 46 and started using the "internet" in 1992 - usenet, gopher, FTP et al. Then came the World Wide Web". Altavista was really all there was before google, why is that "hipster"?
That's like saying you were a hipster for using horse and carriage before Henry Ford started mass producing cars.
If anything being an early adopter of Google seems more "hipster" than using Altavista. Gawd, I musta been and early hipster, how much more "hipster" can you get than that.
the FAST Search guys sold alltheweb.com to yahoo.com and focused on enterprise search (i.e. they sell/license their software to companies) with customers such as newspaper companies, yellow pages companies and government agencies. They were then acquired by Microsoft a few years ago and rolled into their Sharepoint offerings.
Design should help accomplish business (or personal) goals. We run into trouble when we adopt some sort of "minimalism, always, ever, for everything" dogma.
"If additional styling, image, media, or script gives the audience something more - then add it."
Evidence? Examples?
Not debating the effectiveness of that kind of design, but rather pointing out the obviousness that this sort of anti-"always, ever" statement is easily validated.
I HATE the way web design has evolved. I want to make the design choices at my end, not have them imposed on me or consuming a ridiculous amount of bandwidth. Most of the design on the web is no good.
Your issue therefore is not with the design but rather with the browser. There is nothing preventing you from using a text-based browser or even writing your own.
I do not know if you are a developer, designer, or something else, but you must realize that minimalism is itself a "design sensibility" as you term it.
I have the skills and experience to retool my browsing experience for my more minimalist aesthetic, but most consumers experience the web as something more like an animated version of a supermarket checkout magazine. Since getting a smartphone a few years back, I've been especially struck by how much bandwidth is consumed on transmitting cruft on things like news stories, where the actual text is only a few kilobytes and relevant photographs take up no more than a few hundred kb; but after you pile on all the trackers, divs, ads, etc. etc. the page ends up being many megabytes and can easily take 30 seconds over a typical 3g connection.
To me that's enormously consumer-hostile to very little real publisher benefit; the more shit I have to download to see a page the less likely I am to consume news from that source and the more likely I am to reinforce my ad blockers etc. (whereas I will make exceptions for site that make restrained use of such things so they can get a little extra ad revenue or tracking data value in return for the service they provide).
Recently XKCD made me think about how minimalism fits into design. For example, entirely text-driven:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_pace_of_modern_life.png
... and more visually oriented:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/balloon_internet.png
Obviously there are many ways to communicate ideas, and each in various contexts can be quite effective.
I think such a software would have to be free, but I also believe it would change the way web design and advertising works if it caught on.
I didn't read it as a call to minimalism, more so as "It does not matter how flashy your site is, if in the end you have really nothing to say."
It's hard to disagree, honestly (it's also plain common sense, nothing groundbreaking, although the minimalist presentation really helps driving home the point).
If your content is pictures, the same philosophy applies: ditch any ornamentation that gets in the way, just post your damn pictures. If you're selling the pictures? Get the pictures out there and get the "buy" controls out there.
It's still minimalism, and all it's saying is: "if your goal is to show pictures, that fancy layout that pushes all your content into a slick grid of thumbnails, just so people can see some slick fly-out animation when they're clicked upon, is probably just wasting everyone's time."
Relying on words conflicts with the popular concept "show, don't tell". So I think the author's point only applies to a subset of web pages. From my perspective, I want to see screenshots of your app (or preferably try it with a non-signup demo) - I don't want to read a bleeding heart story about your motivation for it. Give me a tagline at best for that.
App web pages need to be designed like HyperCards or PowerPoint presentations - where you aim to lower the number of points on the screen to retain attention.
If the thesis of this editorial is "add only which serves to aid in achieving the spec/goal", I agree. But there is an implicit danger here as well of underestimating the total needs of the resource's end user.
"Art of Travel"[1] is one of those websites. When I read that website I was impressed how lovingly it was put together. The overall experience was so good that I didn't even think about evaluating its design.
[1]http://artoftravel.com/
The post at least highlights that 'web design' is somewhat of a distraction.
There is so much (unnecessary?) labour involved in framing the content by posturing programmers (lost down some rabbit hole) and anal pixel pushers that you could easily forget that to many: the content is what matters.
Getting your head around HTML, publishing and hosting is still not that trivial. That's why people take to something like Facebook, or sharing photos via Instagram via their mobile phones.
That's not to detract from the beauty and the 'miracle' of web publishing.
What I'm obsessed with is the fact every god damned web site on the internet includes google-analytics stuff! You would have made your point had you left it out.