Anti-Web-Design Manifesto (2013)
brandon.invergo.net
brandon.invergo.net
> Designers, it may come as a surprise to you, but not everyone loves your work.
Computer scientist, it may come as a surprise to you, but there are competent people outside of your field of expertise. You're not a genius, and everyone else isn't stupid.
If a designer (or whoever decides) chooses to have custom fonts, client-side scripting or custom style sheets, it's because he weighted the downsides of said choice and still opted for it. If he did not, or he is not aware of the downsides, then it's a matter of incompetence, not web design. So, your pseudo-manifesto should be anti-incompetence, not anti-web-design.
Being "anti-web-design" only tells us that a) you know nothing about design (you don't have the smallest idea regarding methodology or even simply what a designer actually does); and b) it's no more than a rant - all your valid points (which are a few) are obscured by the arrogant and oblivious attitude.
It's a manifesto not a lecture it's even an anti-web-design manifesto. I for one appreciate someone trying to establish other perspectives than my own.
Yes we designers know a lot that he doesn't, but a trip to Dribbble will tell you that there are also many of us who are victims of some of the patterns he is trying to establish an opposition against.
Still, that's a problem with incompetence, not with web design. And Dribbble it's not a good example at all - what's the ratio of pixel-pushers to designers? 10:1? 100:1?
I wouldn't say that it's a problem with "us", since it's clearly a separate group which deserves addressing. There are designers who actually "design" (meaning, they conceive a solution to "someone"), and there are pixel-pushers which mix and mash the latest fads without any particular regard for users and their context (elderly? Here, take flat design! Teens? Flat will do!).
These are two completely distinct objectives: designing vs. doing "something" which looks good. I think the "manifesto" is - or should - be aimed at the latter: gratuitous usage of UI elements/patterns/options. But that's not what design is about, so the "manifesto" is totally misguided and - to be honest - it even becomes ridiculous when the author starts to speak condescendingly to designers (as in the example in my original replies), while being completely oblivious that "design" in itself would imply that any of the options he criticizes were adequately considered (against users and their context).
Sorry, but you are not the authority on the reasons why competent professional designers (or whoever) chose anything. (and I'd argue thtat most professional web designers are bound by many, many requirements that they can't even change, like having intrusive advertising, javascript, tracking and plugins)
Everybody has a right to their opinion and obviously a lot of people don't like the way the web is being "designed" or else we wouldn't have scores of plugins used by millions of people to block or change things they don't like.
> Sorry, but you are not the authority on the reasons why competent professional designers (or whoever) chose anything.
That's why, after the portion you quoted, I added an addendum: "If he did not, or he is not aware of the downsides, then it's a matter of incompetence, not web design".
> Most professional designers are bound by requirements that they can't change, like having intrusive advertising, javascript, tracking and plugins
... and that's why I added, exactly in the portion you quoted, a parenthesis stating "or whoever decides". How could it be clearer?
If "whoever decides" decided for any of these options, it's because he considered it outweighed the "cons" (so, by design), or he didn't considered the "cons" (so, by incompetence).
I doubt it. They're thinking about money and that's it.
How can you blame "web designing" if someone decides that intrusive ads outweigh the UX cons or if someone doesn't even consider said cons? That's my point here - this is not a matter of web design, being anti-web design is misguided and futile. The problem is not web design, the problem is: frivolous or oblivious decision-making, lack of knowledge and consideration about whoever uses the digital product being designed, lack of knowledge about design process, lack of knowledge about design "elements" (layout, color, typography), lack of knowledge of the implications of using extensive e.g. JS...
If you meant to say that "it has nothing to do with web design" then you should have said that instead of trying to defend "competent web designers" as if competence actually had anything to do with it.
No, I did not and - if you don't mind - I would suggest you spend some more time reading and analysing, instead of skim-reading and assuming my argument matches one of the predefined "boxes" you have. See below:
>If you meant to say that "it has nothing to do with web design" then you should have said that
Well, I did. How explicit do I have to be? I said: "then it's a matter of incompetence, not web design".
> instead of trying to defend "competent web designers"
Defend competent web designers? Again, it's a matter of competence. I defended competence - either from designers, programmers or PMs, "whoever decides" (as I stated, very explicitly).
> as if competence actually had anything to do with it.
As if? This is starting to sound very troll-like behaviour. From the beginning, I made it clear that this was about competence.
Someone who bitterly states that "you know nothing about design" is obviously a web designer who is personally insulted by this article, who is obviously defending "web design competence".
You've been arguing that "web design competence" is key here since you said that " A designer either designing for his or her own tastes or trying to find some best-of-all-worlds design will ultimately fail to satisfy the vast majority of visitors to the sit". As if.... but no, they add things we don't like because they have to. That's all you had to say. I think we agree otherwise, so whatever no big deal...
I did not. That came from the "manifesto"; I quoted it to counterpoint. I know it's Friday, but - come on - a little more attention. :)
My point is that it has nothing to do with incompetence, web-design or other. People do bad things for money.
You, OTOH clearly are addressing competence and web-design competence when you said "If a designer (or whoever decides) chooses to have custom fonts, client-side scripting or custom style sheets, it's because he weighted the downsides of said choice and still opted for it. If he did not, or he is not aware of the downsides, then it's a matter of incompetence, not web design."
It's OK to be completely wrong and off-point, but honestly - don't turn around and try to lie about it because someone called you out and you're embarrassed.
(Maybe the reason you're depressed at 30, the prime of your life, is that you're a high-strung prick who tends to take a simple misunderstanding and turn it into a shit-storm. C'est la vie. You put out crap and it comes right back to you ;)
I really hate those. Especially sites like github who capture the Tibetan Unicode block for their font, as this is a character set that I need. http://kephra.de/src/WylieUTF8/
ok I'm likely one of the few who can read Tibetan, but this shows a typical US ignorance, and certainly gives github a bad karma, as they make it impossible to display any Tibetan text on github.
11: Sites that can be viewed better without CSS, if you are a NoScript user. e.g. main page of Medium shows a grayed out layout where its not possible to click on articles without JS. But the become readable again once you disable CSS also. eBay does similar.
I see hiding the content of the site for lack of JS simply as lazy web development, which only considers the most common use case. I don't bother visiting sites who don't support NoScript or text-mode browsers such as Links2.
Unsure is it better, should check on more devices/systems/browsers.
I think it's a great counterexample of the point it's trying to make. Of course is a satire, and the author probably would add a bit of design in a "real" web site.
I imagine bumping up the margins could be problematic, but I'd say all of the other problems are just browser bugs.
Amazon without javascript and multi-column pages would be unbearable. Ad-supported content is fine and keeps the web free, as long as ads are sufficiently on-topic and unobtrusive (sponsored posts, light banners à la The Deck, native advertising...).
Also, the fact that the page is unreadable without either using a custom CSS or resizing the window does not add much to the credibility of the author.
body { max-width: 11in; }
Note that my own personal website conforms very well to his expectations (except loading images from flickr (without javascript) which, as you pointed out, leaks private data). I would add however that the most important thing is readability, responsiveness and speed.
A webpage without stylesheets is technically responsive, but in practice not very readable, due to pretty bad defaults in most browsers (i.e.: tiny fonts and cramped text)
Finally, the most important part of any article-based website (for me) is a full text RSS, which enables me to have actually good reading experience - outside of a web browser.
body { max-width: 35em; }
I'll play with it a little bit more, the ems might be a better solution after all.
It's a fact proven out by years of practice in print.
My preference is ems for text width as that translates naturally to line length. Toss in an auto left an right margin for centered text and a padding directive for keeping text out of the gutters and you're a long way to readability.
||images-amazon.com$object,domain=amazon.comSo we see that it's not impossible to make sites that follow the goals of this "manifesto", and I would say that all of these non-features speaks in favor of the quality of HN.
Clearly, there are sites that do not follow these guidelines, and their business model makes it impossible for them to do so (Facebook, anyone?). As a consumer, which one of those would I rather use?
"As a consumer, which one of those would I rather use?" Well you might prefer HN to Facebook design, but the majority of Facebook users would not.
Maybe we should build a new "sub-web" for hackers with a unique safe browser with no plugins, ajax, javascript, css-animations, html5-* with only non obstrusive sound, video, image and form support.
The people in charge of Safari, Edge and Internet Explorer have not been much of a help either although I suppose there is a chance that will change some day since their sponsors don't make most of their money from advertisers and other professional persuaders. (Although one could argue that the people in charge of Internet Explorer helped a lot in the 1990s and the first half of the last decade, I have seen no signs that they have been helping since then.)
Sometimes I think that the only way for users who agree with the manifesto to get free of the need for regularly writing new user CSS, installing new add-ons and extension and continuing to tweak about:config settings is for them to migrate to a browser whose maintainers have some sympathy for the manifesto.
I sometimes believe that what I just wrote would make a good business plan for a startup.
If I were to buy a phone or a tablet today, I would probably choose one from Apple just because of the content-blocking API Apple promised for iOS 9. (Yes, theoretically, the fact that much or most of Android is open source makes it possible for some new organization or project to offer an Android fork that offers even better ad-blocking than iOS 9 will allow, but after 23 years of experience with open-source software, I know that merely the existence of a particular software freedom does not mean that programmers and designers will do the hard work of converting that freedom into actual code that I will want to use.)
Most of the web is about reading content, and this is where all points on the page shine.
I agree with basically everything on that page.
In fact, we built fully-fledged browser extensions to override website's choices in fonts, colors and whatnot (point 1).
We build extensions to kill js by default (point 2).
We increasingly disable plugins by default (point 3).
We have extensions to block advertising, including inline ones (point 4).
Frames are a thing of the past (point 5), although visual clutter still reigns in "web tabloids" (although we still patch the css via custom styles/extensions)
6) Web fonts have very often poor hinting and lower quality than the exact equivalent in the system. The difference between my locally installed Roboto font and the Woff version is insane. The worst part is that the google font loaders loads the woff version ANYWAY!
Web tablois will still chose random fonts based purely on the looks. Combined with poor hinting, this has prompted me to disable web fonts on my standard browsing profile.
Of course, nobody wants tracking, this seems quite widespread now, with browsers including the useless DNT header (point 7)
"No pagination" went even overboard with continuous loading pages, which many (including myself) hate (point 8).
What about the "facebook/linkedin" login that many websites/betas require to join, and that almost everybody hates? (point 9)
And when all you need to do is reading, you don't want over-the-top animations when you hover on this, dynamic loading that prevents pages to be saved to disk for later reading, and whatever webdesigners think "it's cool" nowdays, because in the end what matters most is the content.
The fact that we have "reader modes" in browsers now is pretty saddening. And it's all due to massive, abusive design using otherwise good browsers extensions.
Because of course, most people don't have a problem with the web as it is, except maybe for a few details like intrusive advertising which could be done away with without eliminating javascript, css and layout complexity entirely. They use it, and enjoy it, and it brings value to their lives.
Insisting that the web is wrong, that most of the people using it are wrong to accept it, that most of the creative decisions made in it are wrong for even attempting to design it, that every possible use of javascript is wrong by definition, and that the only "proper" web is one in which simple, static text documents be allowed to exist is, yes, "really that bad."
Heck, I love what you can do in interactive python notebooks, and there's plenty of very successful pages that use modern technologies at their finest.
But it's a very small minority. So small, in fact, that a "whitelist-based" approach, such as disabling webfonts everywhere but selected sites, has a net-positive effect: it also works on the websites that choose good fonts, because those websites are ironically also the websites that gracefully degrade and/or use html semantically. Similarly for other features.
Many websites, to put it simply, are simply "badly styled" (I don't like to use "designed", because designed would imply some tuning based on a real usage pattern).
I also don't think that users that think that way are in minority: it cannot be that "reader" extensions (which do - in essence - exactly what has been described in the manifesto!) got bundled into browsers as a selling point. If there was no need, they wouldn't be bundled at all. Clearly, there are some non-insignificant amount of people that see this as a plus.
Oh wait, you were being sarcastic :(
The last paragraph in this manifesto is the author pre-complaining about every possible change that will be made in HTML in the future. How much more "hipster yells at clouds" can you get?
As I too am a Person On The Internet, allow me to retort:
HTML was never entirely about displaying plain text, but content. That that content is primarily text doesn't imply it must be primarily text. That train left the station when img tags became a thing.
The ability to embed plugins was a breakthrough, not a mistake. Plugins are the reason video on the web is possible, and video on the web is revolutionary for sharing culture and expression. Flash and Java applets, for all their faults, allowed applications to be accessible by URL, and thanks to HTML5/Canvas and tools like asm.js and whatever-to-js transpilers, we're on the verge of having the web become a network of hyperlinked applications. When you think about the ramifications of that, it's a really big deal.
To want to forbid the web from even reaching the complexity and richness of HTML 1.0 is, frankly, asinine and presumptuous. Notwithstanding that, yes, simple text-based sites have a place and, yes, most uses of javascript to display simple text are kind of pointless and absurd, the author is wrong to want to limit the world's creativity and the web's expressive potential to the boundaries of his own personal elitist prejudice.
9) bis - If your site/app/product/service requires an account, show me what I'll get BEFORE forcing me to sign-up!
False. Fonts make a massive difference in how people perceive a brand, and different fonts can be used for different types of content.
Imagine if every company used Comic Sans for their logo font. http://comicsansproject.tumblr.com/
Seriously, i looked over the page and could not tell the difference for the most part. Only ones i noticed some difference was those where you had a single prominent letter doing all the work.
It's not practical, but something uniquely valuable can be grown from the constraints.
Ahh. Much better.
Maybe they really want to show the importance of user CSS?
Also, I doubt most regular users could be bothered to actually write custom CSS for the entire web. Most people have zero knowledge of how to do it, not to mention how to actually improve what they want to improve.
The only reasonable real world case I can see is accessibility, which is certainly a valid case, and should be considered by all web designers/developers.
Don't expect your users to surf your website with a magnifying glass, e.g. http://smittenkitchen.com/
how do you retreive a forgotten password?
In any case, if a login is required, take the absolute minimum of necessary information, ideally only a login name and a password.
maybe better than a login name and password, make it an email address and password. email address seems pretty vital for any kind of future communication
That's actually a reason many users don't like supplying an e-mail address. They don't want an ongoing relationship with a website, they just want to buy a box of widgets today. What I do in that case is provide a customised e-mail address and then blacklist it after the item arrives.
As for using e-mail address as the account identifier, if you do that please ensure it can be changed everywhere in your system.
I recently moved to a new domain ( cheaper annual renewal ) and whilst Amazon and eBay were painless for changing e-mail address, many other large operators were messy. Tesco, for example, is still sending half of its communications to my old address.
obey you heathens.
My read is that his "no foo" requirements don't disallow sites from using CSS, javascript, plugins, etc, but require that core functionality be available without these. At the very least the ability to read the page.
I'm leaning strongly to sites focusing on a small number of basic design templates and allowing strong user deference in how those are styled: article, homepage, gallery, slideshow, catalog page. That may be a vain hope, but most sites operate with a small set of basic templates, and tools such as LaTeX have achieved tremendous mileage from a small set of standard document types. Yes, they tend to look similar. ThatsThePoint.jpg.
As a strong counterexample, take another current HN story, "On doing things other people can't", a Blogspot post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10136955 http://pathsensitive.blogspot.com/2015/08/sources-of-power.h...
Unless I specifically enable JS for pathsensitive.blogspot.com, www.blogger.com, and www.blogblog.com, the article displays as a blank page.
Even with these enabled, the page is awkward to read -- a pop-out menue overlays the top of the scrollbar, the fonts are too small, the line length too long, and an annoying persistent header overlays the top 25% of the page (including browser elements: titlebar, tabs, navigation, and menus). I literally transcribed raw text to Markdown to read the entry
Of major blogging sites, Blogspot's among the worst for default themes, and its "dynamic" themes are especially bad.
I'm among those who've been ranting about the horrible state of the Web for basic reading for some time:
https://redd.it/256lxu https://redd.it/29eqrk
So, if I may offer some interpretations of Brandon's suggestions:
Completely override-able CSS: Not "don't use CSS", but "use a standard, minimal page structure which allows elements to be readily identified and styled, and don't go fucking overboard with styling.
Compare, Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into HTML5, which 1) has a really nice default stylesheet, and a really fucking minimal page structure:
http://diveintohtml5.info/index.html view-source:http://diveintohtml5.info/index.html
The entity nesting depth is mostly one (there's not even <article> tags), rarely more than two.
Contrast that with pages in which every single element is explicitly styled inline and absolutely positioned. I've got a "bruteforce.css" which strips most such nonsense. As Brandon notes, excessive div nesting is almost always a sign of such breakage.
No client-side scripts: Again, to simply read the site. See the Blogspot example above.
Plugins: As before. Better: look through old sites featuring A/V content and note the instances of RealPlayer requirements. I'm not sure that plugin's even available any more, I certainly wouldn't want to rely on it. Sites which provided WAV files, or better, MP3 or OGG downloads, still work. Sites reliant on proprietary plugins, not so much. Flash and client-side Java are rapidly heading here, similarly Silverlight (specific to Microsoft MSIE).
Advertising: Many or most of the problems online are a direct consequence of advertising: bloated pages, cross-site scripting, security vulnerabilities, and crap content. I see a fundamental need to change the funding model, though no clear path to doing so.
No frames, multi-columns or other visual clutter: On this I agree. I've restyled many sites to push sidebars, asides, floats, etc, either above or below the main content. I'll occasionally encounter such sites unstyled and ... it's usually a shock.
Examples:
Stock/multicolumn: http://i.imgur.com/80zmE3i.png http://i.imgur.com/M2OiyOU.png
Modified/single column: http://i.imgur.com/nBdCZoY.png http://i.imgur.com/sNoOdZp.png
No non-standard fonts: The problems I have here are, variously:
1. WebFonts which simply do not render. Medium.com on my (ancient) Android mobile device is completely blank, as is Wired.com. This is annoying.
2. Fucking with font-weight, letter-spacing, and/or text-shadow. You do not want to do this for body text EVER. My instant response on seeing such a page is to simply sigh. Usually I'll move on.
Pagination: This is an absolute. There's no need to break up content any shorter than a book chapter (though improved content navigation for longer works is a weakness of HTML).
Account requirements/registration: Data. Are. Liability. Any time you request user data, you should ask yourself, "can we not do this?" You cannot lose what you do not have. You will lose what you do have, though when, where, to whom, and how far after the fact you realise it are all open questions.
What's really sad is how old most of these guidelines are.
Jacob Nielsen compiled his original list of 10 mistakes in Web design in 1996. Modulo a few technology nomenclature changes, they all still apply:
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/original-top-ten-mistakes-in...
1. Using Frames (now: iFrames)
2. Gratuitous Use of Bleeding-Edge Technology
3. Scrolling Text, Marquees, and Constantly Running Animations (carousels, autoplay video)
4. Complex URLs
5. Orphan Pages
6. Long Scrolling Pages (for landing pages. For articles, not so much)
7. Lack of Navigation Support (also: mystery-meat navigation, see "hamburger").
8. Non-Standard Link Colors (now: nonstandard any colours. Fad now is fucking with ::selection colours).
9. Outdated Information
10. Overly Long Download Times
Nielsen's returned to that topic many times, see:
"Ten Good Deeds in Web Design":
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-good-deeds-in-web-design...
"'Top Ten Mistakes' Revisited Three Years Later" http://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-ten-mistakes-revisited-t...
"113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability" (October 31, 2001) http://www.useit.com/articles/113-design-guidelines-homepage...
"The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines" (November 10, 2003) http://www.nngroup.com/articles/most-violated-homepage-guide...
Note especially: 2. Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size. Yes, responsive design. In two thousand fucking three.
Completely disagree with this one. The web has evolved into a landscape that exceeds its original intended use. It's not just about semantic documents any more - its community, interaction, and more in the most portable format we've ever seen.
The web has taken on a life of its own, beyond what it was initially designed for.
This is of course obvious to all of us, and probably to this author as well, but I felt like I had to point that out.
Strange.