We need a new an HTML5 what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor (a new Frontpage/Dreamweaver). Sadly, the HTML "contentEditable" API is in a very broken state.
As always we're oscillating. I too am thinking the older wilder web had something that has been lost nowadays. Everything is very similar even if cuter and more interactive. There were a lot of curious 'design' and aesthetics before.
They can't possibly have been around that long - according to all the other very original comments here, the web would have imploded and turned into 1995 geocities or some such.
I taught myself coding HTML by hand using Hippie. I regressed and switched to Frontpage because it was so "easy". I then went over to the Dreamweaver and stayed there until I learned server-side programming, which put me back in the text editor, where I've happily been since.
Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.
Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.
Exactly my thought when I saw the line "to produce beautiful display text" with an example that would have been atrocious on any GeoCities page.
OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)
I would say that this is almost more of a "developer design link" than a "designer design link". As in an engineer/dev can implement these "effects", in code without touching graphic editing software.
Same here - I thought some of the effects were just very subtle, until I opened the link in Chrome! Oh well, most of our client traffic is not Firefox so this isn't such a huge issue.
AFAIK most people use Noscript for privacy/security reasons, there's no way it makes the web more usable considering how prevalent javascript is these days.
Sure. Lots of websites have really questionable javascript behavior, like replicating mobile behavior where dragging the mouse around makes you "swipe" between articles, or in-line image resizing (wikipedia), or auto-rotating image galleries, or shitty page-loading effects like fading text in, or breaking your scrollbar.
NoScript eliminates that kind of garbage.
In addition to this, there's the privacy benefits, lowering your page load time and CPU usage, and avoiding running arbitrary programs on your computer loaded off the internet, which is how GitHub was DDOSed last month.
For an average, non-technical user, I wouldn't recommend NoScript. But if you're willing to put up with a little annoyance of allowing two or three domains now and then, it really makes a lot of webpages behave better.
NoScript also has surrogate scripts that replace what was blocked with a minimal script to un-break sites. It's usually used to fool a site with first-party scripts enabled into thinking that the third-party scripts loaded, too, but there are also scripts that allow a site to work without any of its scripts being enabled. The changelog currently show that they recently added a surrogate to allow some troublesome wordpress themes to work without scripting, and to allow the Microsoft support site to show article content without scripting.
I've yet to find a Chrome plugin that does what Toggle Animated GIFs does for Firefox.
Anybody know of one?
I'm 100% in favor of breaking up a wall of text with images, but too many bloggers favor distracting animated ones. In my perfect world, they'd be a still frame with a play button, like any other embedded video.
"When making headers or display texts on your website, you'll often want to stylize your text in a decorative way."
Oh dear.
"..with minimal effort to produce beautiful display text"
The original fonts are tweaked painstakingly by a designer. The "effects" are like putting lipstick on Mona Lisa.
Web site design is now a branch of publishing and design and Google is one of the larger corps operating in the area. This is like... I don't know, offering a high end DSLR with a physical button to add instagram filters and lens flare to the original image. Well, for free, but the decision process to add these features gives the appearance of amateurism and lack of respect for good design.
Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
> Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
Plenty of money in that demographic; when Google can track schoolkids habits they can predict their future habits as adults and be the first to sell the best ads. Google (and Target) knows about the first pregnancy before the mother.
92 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadps: gradient overlay is seriously lacking. https://www.google.com/search?q=font+gradient+metal&tbm=isch
Look at the list: "Support: Chrome, Safari".
You may be fooled by the shiny new wrapper around the docs into thinking this is a new thing.
GooGleoCities, perhaps?
Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.
Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.
Would have been an awesome April Fools' prank.
OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)
☠☠☠ http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2620/index.htm ☠☠☠
Maybe it's my age, but I'm getting more and more tired of unreadable pages that take ages and a lot of resources to load.
I just learned they went out of business in 2009 :-(
They will forever be spinning in my heart.
Extensions required to make the web usable:
AdBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/
NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
Toggle Animated GIFs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animat...
> NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
Can you elaborate, how does noscript makes web more usable?
Used it for 6 months switched machines and didn't want to go through the learning curve again.
NoScript eliminates that kind of garbage.
In addition to this, there's the privacy benefits, lowering your page load time and CPU usage, and avoiding running arbitrary programs on your computer loaded off the internet, which is how GitHub was DDOSed last month.
For an average, non-technical user, I wouldn't recommend NoScript. But if you're willing to put up with a little annoyance of allowing two or three domains now and then, it really makes a lot of webpages behave better.
Anybody know of one?
I'm 100% in favor of breaking up a wall of text with images, but too many bloggers favor distracting animated ones. In my perfect world, they'd be a still frame with a play button, like any other embedded video.
Ghostery: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ghostery/
and Cookie Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-block/
Good blocking of trackers and off-brand cookies, but without dealing with the whitelisting of new/broken sites all the time.
https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
Oh dear.
"..with minimal effort to produce beautiful display text"
The original fonts are tweaked painstakingly by a designer. The "effects" are like putting lipstick on Mona Lisa.
Web site design is now a branch of publishing and design and Google is one of the larger corps operating in the area. This is like... I don't know, offering a high end DSLR with a physical button to add instagram filters and lens flare to the original image. Well, for free, but the decision process to add these features gives the appearance of amateurism and lack of respect for good design.
Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
Plenty of money in that demographic; when Google can track schoolkids habits they can predict their future habits as adults and be the first to sell the best ads. Google (and Target) knows about the first pregnancy before the mother.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...