
This is a motherfucking website. And it’s fucking not completely perfect - maxspeicher
http://twentyoheight.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/this-is-a-motherfucking-website-and-its-fucking-not-completely-perfect/
======
x1798DE
I think the criticisms on this site are fundamentally wrong-headed. The
original motherfucking website is reflowable, lightweight text that conveys
everything it needs to. Navigation doesn't need to be "fixed to the viewport",
and lines don't need to be 66 characters long.

If every website were designed like the "motherfucking website", I could
design a "browsing theme" where all lines were 66 characters long. If there
were some navigation metadata in there, I could theme the browser to show that
as a viewport at the top. I could change the aesthetics _to the user 's
preference_.

Not that there's anything that can be done about it from this equilibrium, but
I think the problem is that people got it in their head that they should be
able to control how users view their sites, and that's wrong. If you consider
markup to be metadata about how your data should be displayed, then you
shouldn't have to do any QA testing or cross-device testing, because the onus
of design would be _on the browser_. You'd choose a browser that displays
websites the way you like to see them. Everything would be automatically 100%
cross-platform and accessible, because you're not trying to use markup to
force a specific way of viewing your site.

Honestly, the _hubris_ of designers can be amazing. As if aesthetics is a
universal. Maybe some people _prefer_ 100 lines of text per line. Maybe some
people want to zoom a mobile site. It's so incredibly difficult to
specifically create a single (or even adaptive) design that works for blind
people, people with every different kind of colorblindness, people using every
browser on the market on devices with vastly different screen sizes and
resolutions, people with every kind of character set and a million different
aesthetic preferences you've never even _thought_ of. And yet it's so easy to
just put your content up there with markup suggestions about how it should be
displayed and let users choose how they want to see it. They'll do your work
_for you_.

~~~
Detrus
It's not so much the hubris of designers as the economics. Designers bring the
print culture with them, where everything published gets visually polished by
a human. You don't just dump tagged text from a typewriter.

The web is designed precisely to dump text from a digital typewriter. And the
visual design can be universal or customized by a user.

This poses a minor problem because if actually implemented as intended,
thousands of designers would be out of work. You'd need very few to make
universal text display themes and occasionally improve them. And more complex
UIs could be handled with something like bootstrap.

But there are far more people with the print designer mindset, recreating the
old world in digital form, then there are visionary designers like Doug
Engelbart who wanted to use computers to do new things. And you can't just
retrain those people to not spend their lives changing line lengths and text
colors to shove ads and make display cases, that's all they know. It's an
economics problem.

~~~
x1798DE
I understand why designers would want to protect the jobs they currently have,
but I personally think that it would actually be better if talented coders and
designers were freed up from the [unnecessary] work of creating themes for
every website in existence. There's plenty to do in this world that we don't
need some of our smartest and best people doing unnecessary work.

~~~
Detrus
Sure but you can't re-allocate workers in a capitalist economy with a paper
idea and a signature. You have to convince thousands of people. You have to
convince investors to start new companies where new types of workers are doing
something new on the web. You probably can't re-educate millions of the
current designers, code monkeys, content farmers and clients to do new types
of work that has nothing to do with their old work.

There are plenty of these smartest and best people trying startups and they're
not really measuring up to what computer pioneers imagined. Seems the best we
can do for Engelbart's complex topic discussion systems are Wikipedia, Quora,
Reddit and HN.

HN's designer Paul Graham subscribes to Job's idea of simple, minimalist
interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of
thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but
were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning
on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell.

For reference

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeSgaJt27PM)
[http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q](http://youtu.be/xQx-tuW9A4Q)

------
JohnTHaller
> However, a website featuring larger amounts of content would require a
> navigation bar, optimally fixed to the top of the viewport.3 This navigation
> bar should adapt to smaller screens without device- or resolution-specific
> break points (= device-agnostic design).

At which point you end up with yet another site that takes up over 1/3 of the
viewport with a navigation bar on many phones held in landscape.

~~~
Retric
For a true minimalist website. Breadcrumbs + an index page should work for
most sites.

Or go Wikipedia style with search and in context links.

------
tofof
His 3 complaints - linelength, navigation, aesthetics.

If only it was 1994 and people could resize their 'viewport' to get the line
length they prefer, instead of having snobby designers force it to be what
they value.

~~~
coldtea
> _If only it was 1994 and people could resize their 'viewport' to get the
> line length they prefer, instead of having snobby designers force it to be
> what they value._

Only it's 2014, and people have 10+ tabs open. They can be bothered to resize
the browser size for each and everyone of them. And some prefer the browser to
be full screen, etc.

~~~
Dylan16807
I have far more than a reasonable number of tabs open, and I can tell you I've
never encountered that problem. Once I set the width I like, it works for all
pages. The only exception I can think of is the odd video site that doesn't
fullscreen properly, but watching videos is a bit of a mode switch anyway; it
can handle a maximize click.

------
byerley
Reminds me of the GNU documentation -
[http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/index.html](http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/index.html)

I feel like I was taught at one point that the web was supposed to be flat
HTML/HTTP and that interactive stuff was supposed to be reserved for
applications. Did that used to be a thing?

------
coldtea
> _An optimally readable line should contain only ~66 characters, which
> corresponds to ~30 em.1 To reduce the amount of scrolling, this can be
> augmented with a multi-column layout and pagination._

Err, no, multi-column layout sucks (you have to scroll back to the top to read
the next column). And pagination sucks too.

Just make the text take 70 or so characters wide.

------
chatmasta
I wonder how a website like this would convert if you were selling a product.
I imagine if you're selling a web app, where design matters, conversions would
be shit. But if you're selling something where it doesn't matter how your
website looks? I bet this could convert fantastically.

~~~
jiggy2011
I guess it depends on your customers, I don't know how many people would be
confident putting credit card information into a website like that.

------
rasur
I wish people would learn to fucking swear properly. That fucking title is not
completely fucking perfect.

/s

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thuuuomas
Why would one prefer pagination over scrolling? Is it just about the clicks?

------
th3iedkid
>>Good design is as little design as possible Is there something called 10%
design or 100% design?What's little design ?

------
thetjrivier
Reminder that JavaScript frameworks are useless bloat that kill page load
times and degrade user experience. Plain HTML/ CSS/ JS already does everything
just as easily.

In what other language is it a good idea to compile the entire standard
library each time the program is run?

~~~
coldtea
Julia I think :-)

~~~
KenoFischer
Not exactly true. The standard library is precompiled and the same is worked
on for packages.

