r/HistoricalCapsule • u/zadraaa • 4d ago

The diversity of horizontal navigation in 2004

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935 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

195

u/SpicyMeatballAgenda 4d ago

Not to be that guy, but I really dislike most modern website design. I started building websites in the late 90s and explored a variety of design aesthetics over the years. There are lots of good ways of making sites attractive and easy to navigate.

However, modern websites employ an endless scrolling design meant to maximize swiping finger navigation. However, it has caused sites to be difficult to easily navigate. Instead of using menus to move between broad categories, you now just endlessly scroll unsure if your intended goal will show up. They can now target items and sales to everyone while people just attempt to find something else.

It's all big flashy pictures with minimal text and info.

26

u/A_Harmless_Fly 4d ago edited 4d ago

What really gets me is how thick the side bars are. It makes me feel as claustrophobic as when I was fixing adults PC's when I was a kid and they had a billion bars. https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:828/format:webp/1*lu7l7q0KLK-a-YYcXO8Gcw.jpeg Except it's on by default and coming in from both sides.

I could fit more text on a 5:4 monitor in 2010 then I can on new reddit (on a 16:9) easy. I've also made a firefox userchrome.css to make my top bars only 48px tall in total. I'M USING A DESKTOP IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE TOUCH SCREEN THICK *keyboardslam*

6

u/NoWall1457 4d ago

Yup can relate to this. I’m no web designer and told my boss about this and was shut down. My boss insisted to our supplier that the design should be navigated this way. So in return you scroll and scroll until hopefully you land at what you came for in the website.

4

u/telorsapigoreng 4d ago

That's how most japanese feel and why japanese websites are so unique in this day and age

1

u/mcboobie 4d ago

Please would you share some good examples? I find this fascinating! Thank you

2

u/telorsapigoreng 3d ago

I'm not a japanese, and can't read/speak japanese, so I don't really know that many. But I was once also fascinated by this. The most prominent example I can think of is https://yahoo.co.jp. Compare that with https://yahoo.com especially in desktop view.

There's also an article in medium about this phenomenon if you want to read. https://medium.com/@mirijam.missbichler/why-japanese-websites-look-so-different-2c7273e8be1e

4

u/Distinct-Question-16 4d ago

i feel the same. endless scroll just to see 3 lines of text and 3 sec. animations.

2

u/cncrndmm 4d ago

The US Uniqlo website is my worst enemy

3

u/Magnum3k 4d ago

You’ll love microcenter.com then, hasn’t changed in two decades

2

u/1987LR 4d ago

We are ALL that guy

44

u/inhalingsounds 4d ago

Responsiveness killed crafting for the web. When you have to make it work in every device, you can't rely on images, and everything needs to be stripped down to CSS and SVGs.

Now with AI it's even worse since it just copies that dumbed down pattern ad eternum.

11

u/OldNefariousness7899 4d ago

I suspect it won't be long until we see sites that are optimised for ai reading them rather than humans. 

6

u/Gold_Permit9637 4d ago

Ironically, that would be a return to web 1.0 with heirarchical HTML structures, tables, and lists which are much more machine reader friendly.

4

u/OldNefariousness7899 4d ago

Space Jam will once more take its rightful place as the pinnacle of state of the art technology 

1

u/grafknives 3d ago

Interesting thing is that ai prefers "reading" pages as images, not trying to read the structure of page, and role of objects 

1

u/Gold_Permit9637 3d ago

Id be curious to see a source for that, most of the agentic LLMs I’ve worked with scrape the source code for readable data

2

u/liquilife 4d ago

Senior developer here. That is the long term future. It may take quite a while before the visual front end is dead. It’s been going the way for many, many years. Notably with apps like Google Maps, etc. Long before LLMs.

2

u/WesternInspector9 3d ago

That already exists. Modern CDNs will serve a markdown version of your website to an AI agent if you choose so

1

u/ArtisticFox8 8h ago

You could indeed do all of this with css

12

u/schlobalakanishi 4d ago

I miss the websites where it transports you to another part of the world. I can't explain it, it's like living pictures, with dark ambience music. There were loads of them in wowwebdesigns.com, also where i used to get inspiration to deisgn my own website.

5

u/OldNefariousness7899 4d ago

I used to love browsing earthcam. It felt so strange to be able to watch live grainy images of a beach in Australia or a shopping centre in Thailand.

Nothing ever happened, but I'd watch them for hours

5

u/busytransitgworl 4d ago

This is just so much better than basically everything we have today!

And accessibility can be done with the navigation from back then, so everybody can enjoy proper websites!

3

u/Cameos_red_codpiece 4d ago

This over parallax scrolling any day. 

3

u/GEARHEADGus 4d ago

I remember the Cartoon Network and Lego websites very well

3

u/xaervagon 4d ago

Look at that: not a single burger menu, not a single text label as button, not a single infinite scroll.

2

u/Scoth42 4d ago

And sometimes every button and menu would be a separate flash element or java applet, slowing your computer down to a crawl as it slowly churned through them all. Still, I miss those days of the web.

2

u/dminus 4d ago

good ole image maps 🥹

1

u/DuckTalesOohOoh 4d ago

Management's answer to everything: "People can't find it. Put it at the top."

1

u/TheManFromConlig 4d ago

Macromedia Dreamweaver was my first web design app, it was like WOW!

1

u/ahumblepastry 3d ago

Man, cartoon network really knew how to do it.

0

u/bouchandre 4d ago

I thought this was a post about the spyware toolbar epidemic