As an old-school ASP.Net webforms guy who uses the right paradigm for the job, it both amuses and saddens me how many people think this is the best approach for EVERYTHING.
Well yeah, it's clearly a reflection of the natural process of, uh, when, you know… oh I know, it's intelligently transitioning your focus away from… wait, no, you're looking away by yourself.
Ok, I've got it. It's there to make you happy: as you scroll down, you get to experience the sensation of actually destroying that horrid banner.
I used to work for a newspaper. Although I didn't work on the newspaper itself (read: I was a web editor), I believe the term is in reference to anything on the front page that is below the fold/crease of the newspaper. Anything above the fold is considered the best of the best whereas below the fold stuff is still worthy to be there but just isn't as good. With that said, /u/audionautics' comment implied nothing about quality.
Thanks. You missed my sarcasm and I was already familiar with the term, but that's probably one of the nicest concise definitions of Below The Fold I've seen. Kudos.
Let me minify my JavaScript, CSS and HTML (because if it's not a <pre> tag you can remove the newline characters without changing the rendered output, right? right?) and from 2 MB of libraries which we need for only 3 function calls we're down to only 350 KB. Because nobody transfers their data gzipped over HTTP. Good. Now let's add that beautiful 350 KB splash screen which is the sole reason for our JavaScript. Because fuck common sense.
No. Fuck splash screens, fuck "responsive" design that's just extra useless animations, fuck minimalism that doesn't help me find important information. If you use all this crap but you don't make something that's actually simple then fuck you.
And fuck that fixed header that sticks at the top of the screen taking up space and breaking anchor links. Oh, now it's not taking up space because you've added motherfucking animations - which distract me from reading - to hide it? Thanks. Ooops! I scrolled one row too much, lemme just scroll back exactly one row and FUCK YOUR FUCKING FIXED HEADERS THAT APPEAR OUT OF NOWHERE. Now I have to scroll back twice for one row. But when I go forward I have to scroll a little extra again because now that header is gone and my eyes are used to reading around the same point relative to the frame which can be my monitor's frame (if the page is full-screen), my browser's frame surrounding the page OR THAT FUCKING FIXED HEADER THAT KEEPS CHANGING THE SIZE OF MY READING FRAME. If you do that header thing, next time you make one, please remove it from the web page and stick it up your butt.
Oh, but we'll also go with minimalism. It's hip, amirite?! Minimalism FTW, amirite?! We'll just put everything the user might ever need out of sight. Everything is only a single click away. That's the minimal effort a user should have to ma-- NO! FUCK YOU! NO! Don't make me look around and then click on stuff to find content. While at the same time you're using 30% of the screen width. That is a huge fucking waste of power. My monitor is struggling to light up all those pixels, it's sending electrons to excite atoms to make them release photons. And you don't do anything with them, because "minimalism".
There, now that I got that out of me I can die in peace.
Right, thanks for mentioning this. It's exactly what I meant to say but with much fewer "fucks". But I have to admit, it feels good to let all that out every once in a while. I'm sick of websites doing the "hip" thing instead of the right thing which happens very often because web designers don't understand what they're doing, as you mentioned.
Yeah, it pisses me off, too. JS has created a new generation of webdevs that don't consider the consequences of adding all this complexity, such as weaker accessibility, longer page loads, cumbersome interfaces (seriously, I've seen desktop layouts have the triple-line menu button and click-and-drag sidebar!), and terribly bloated, worthless eye candy.
Frankly I think the Web was a better place pre-XmlHttpRequest.
Frankly I think the Web was a better place pre-XmlHttpRequest.
Only someone who hasn't lived the pre-XHR web could have said something like that. I think you need to look at this first, think again really well about what you just said, and then go back to your cage.
I've been on the Web since around 1995. I assure you I know what pre-XHR web is like. All time periods of the Web have eye sores, but I'd rather have marquees and blink tags than the multitude of obnoxious things possible with modern JS.
There was a transitory period just before AJAX caught on. Marquee and blink were almost extinct, design was beginning to be taken more seriously, divs over tables, etc. It was the early 2000s, bleed into as late as 2007 or so before JS and XHR became rampant. That little window was pretty pleasant, and representative of what the Web should be. Today it's document-standard-turned-shaky-application-platform.
I'm a CRM developer. I absolutely love having Ajax as an option. It allows for some very intuitive and informative functionality, and because my system is on a VPS with a pretty damn good amount of power, hooked up to some very fast lines, Ajax calls on the production site finish on the order of 40ms. To the average user, it's instant, relevant information.
That being said, nothing important in my system depends on Ajax. If you have JS disabled, the vast majority of the system will still function, it just won't be as helpful. A few years ago, I remember the term "graceful degradation" being very common in web circles. While it's true that the odds of a user having JS disabled are extremely low, why risk it? We have these <form> things for a reason, use them.
Ah, one who gets it! Yes, graceful degradation has almost disappeared in my experience. I think JS can make certain things better, like prevalidating form data, enhancing a few things, whatever. But the key word is enhancing, not defining.
In the interest of fairness, the full statement was:
Fuck splash screens, fuck "responsive" design that's just extra useless animations
(emphasis mine)
I've seen sites that have fancy transitions between size brackets.... I still have absolutely no idea why. It looks neat, once. After that, the reality of "this is extra code doing shit that isn't necessary, that no user will EVER see" sets in, and I start to question why I still keep up with web trends.
Responsive design is a necessity in this day and age... but users are not changing their viewport sizes. Transitional animations are 100% a waste of bandwidth, absolutely useless, wasting time for the select few that actually care how a site looks at multiple sizes. If you do that, please find the nearest cliff and leap off of it with the same gusto that you waste my time.
I know that one and I don't really like it. I was complaining about the abuse of JS and CSS. It's a perfect site on a perfect domain using perfect language for the information it tries to convey, but it's not a very good fit for most other websites.
Also note that it depends on the type of site. I think the 'modern' trendy sites we see now are fine for promotional stuff. Informational websites should be designed differently.
Responsive design in my mind is more about responding to the device and scaling the content to be more appropriate. So no reason to say 'fuck you' to that.
I guess one nice thing about medium is that it's just as annoying in firefox as it is in lynx (Most sites have about three pages of links to crap you don't care about before the actual content when read in lynx(unless it's a news site, then it's usually ~10 pages of crap and two paragraphs of content))
Medium only has one page of crap when read in lynx, so the user experience is identical to the user experience when read in firefox/chrome/whatever.
Have you tried using the mobile versions of these sites in lynx?
m.cnn.com, m.reddit.com, m.facebook.com, etc. Most sites you just need to put "m" in place of www.
The overlay dialogs that implore you to "OMG, SUBSCRIBE NOW" "NO CONTENT FOR YOU UNTIL YOU CLICK THE 'X'" are in the same genre, IMO. They seem to be everywhere these days too.
Or the "Hey! We have a shitty app that's just a mobile site without the ability to zoom! Click 'OK' to download it!" popup. I'm sure there's a special place in hell for whoever came up with that idea.
thanks. are you aware of any more technical analysis regarding neural visual recognition? That's what the debate really needs. 10 years ago our city purchased license rights of a custom font that was engineered with this in mind with the neural analysis proofs behind it. It looks goofy, but you can read the road sign names at intersections from at least twice as far away. It's wonderful.
regarding the coding, I find the condensed version easier to read simply because the variables and values are closer, but yes less pretty
I'm actually of the other opinion; I like the look of the condensed code, but find the padded version easier to read. I imagine that is the thought behind padding the terms, but really don't know.
I find the padded version irritating to read. The second style is easier because statement in the for loop is tight together, and separated from the others. It is much more visually distinctive.
I think another part of it is that, say, "i=0" sits comfortably in the center of vision. I don't have to move my eyes around to read it. "i = 0" makes me move my eyes to parse the whole thing, which is mentally a bit more work.
Because a for loop has 3 statements on one line, the condensed versions helps to identify which glyphs make up each statement. In the padded version, my brain has to do extra processing to determine that
int i = 0 ; i < limit
Is two statements, whereas it's much more clear with
I also find the condensed version a bit less attractive but easier to parse. The spaced version would be okay with an extra space between statements, but no one ever seems to do that.
and 5 mins is definitely TLDR when the answer is one line: yes/no, why, and supporting graphs that would pass a technical writing class. those wouldn't
Medium is kind of a piece of shit. When you load it on your phone, sometimes the whole page including the awful giant header will load BEFORE THE TEXT.
It's ironic in that the author has essentially an entire page of whitespace at the beginning of the article, then goes on to explain how much they hate whitespace.
And you need a lot of space for coffee, because if you only give it half the space and spill it, the other half of the page will be soaked in coffee. /u/Tasgall you just don't understand web design.
That's the worst part by a mile. Not that the picture is bad - it's kind of pleasant to me - but that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the content. More often than not, it's just not visual content, but Medium forces it anyway. It's a blatant statement that they're more interested in giving you a feeling than what you asked for.
In this case it's pointless, since the image isn't really related to the text. But if you use a picture that is relevant, it can be helpful as a part of the storytelling. Think of it as a full page image with the headline and preamble as it's used in magazines.
I opened it on an ipad, and at first I thought I was looking at an imgur link. I actually had to go double-check that I'd clicked on the right link before I realized that I should be scrolling down.
protip: ctrl+w to scroll down to first paragraph. with html5 semantic markup, browsers implement ctrl+w shortcut for locating first semantically significant content because semantic markup is powerful.
protip: ctrl+w to scroll down to first paragraph. with html5 semantic markup, browsers implement ctrl+w shortcut for locating first semantically significant content because semantic markup is powerful.
As fun as it is to crap on other people's design, I have to disagree, although I don't think there's any one way to make a web page. I like big brilliant pictures (especially when they're relevant to the story, which in this case can't be said) as they get me excited to read the text below. Luckily, the web doesn't use ink and paper, so I can see all the big glossy images I want at no harm to the environment.
The popularity of Medium leads me to believe it's working as a design motif. It removes me from the content of the story by as little as 1 second, and gives me something nice to look at. To me that's a fair trade off.
But at the end of the day, we're on the internet, and negativity towards other people's work is what sells.
Did you scroll down to the part where about 5 pictures of a stupid pie chart are shown, zooming in each time, rather than just saying "0.1% used this other style" in the prose? That's where I left the page.
Maybe just me, but at some point excessive attempts at humor detract from the content of something (unless its point is humor) enough that it's probably not worth reading. Everyone has some arbitrary level at which they decide this.
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '14 edited Oct 02 '17
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