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Development => Web => Topic started by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 03:46:11 PM

Title: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 03:46:11 PM
There used to be a time when web design did not suck and allowed websites to have character, not just text with an oversized, plain-color header, without complains from 13-15 years olds about how unprofessional it is

Check this out:
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/games/sc/

(http://i.imgur.com/ZbMW6Gv.jpg)

Not that I hate simple website designs, but it gets boring when all websites look the same. This is 2017, not 1995. Does anyone else agree?
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 02, 2017, 03:55:56 PM
I miss the days when HTML was HTML and you did ur design with tables and your background with stacked thumbnails <3
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 04:29:37 PM
Now to be fair, I don't miss tables in the slightest. Divs are much eaiser to deal with. But I wish the div/CSS3 era came out way back then. Would have been epic.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: xMarminq_ on April 02, 2017, 04:58:03 PM
Hey, if you remove the <Head> in any HTML website you get the 1995 look  :D ;)
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: _iPhoenix_ on April 02, 2017, 07:09:39 PM
I made a dummy site with plain text, and it didn't change.


I then copied some w3 schools tuts, and they didn't change. So I 'hired' a friend who wrote a ridiculous amount of random CSS and HTML stuff, and tried it. It crashed.


It worked on a simpler example, cool tip!
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 02, 2017, 07:12:37 PM
Quote from: xMarminq_ on April 02, 2017, 04:58:03 PM
Hey, if you remove the <Head> in any HTML website you get the 1995 look  :D ;)
it's just that all the external style files (CSS Documents, JavaScript Files, ...) are declared and called in the HEADER so you simply kill any interaction as well as design.
This cripples most sites and leaves them non-functional :P
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Sorunome on April 02, 2017, 07:15:19 PM
I think the biggest problem the web-dev area has currently is that it is changing too fast, so if you learn something new now you know that it will be already obsolete next year.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: _iPhoenix_ on April 02, 2017, 07:16:45 PM
Quote from: Sorunome on April 02, 2017, 07:15:19 PM
I think the biggest problem the web-dev area has currently is that it is changing too fast, so if you learn something new now you know that it will be already obsolete next year.

I thought I knew HTML, then HTML 5 happened.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: c4ooo on April 02, 2017, 07:16:59 PM
Quote from: xMarminq_ on April 02, 2017, 04:58:03 PM
Hey, if you remove the <Head> in any HTML website you get the 1995 look  :D ;)
(http://imgur.com/UyMAoa8.png)
Sorry taskmanager got in the way.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 02, 2017, 07:32:38 PM
Quote from: Sorunome on April 02, 2017, 07:15:19 PM
I think the biggest problem the web-dev area has currently is that it is changing too fast, so if you learn something new now you know that it will be already obsolete next year.
For middleware developers this luckily does not apply, as the big standards (like Notes, AEM, ...) haven't really changed in the last 10 years. Sure there were updates, but your old knowledge is still essential.
Sadly it loosk different for Backend as well as Frontend developers. There I have to agree with you. The changes happen so fast nowerdays people forget what wuality means as they dont even learn the whole depth of the technology until it's already "too old" again :/
Web devs tend to get more and more lazy.
It's not about creating new things anymore, it's only about connecting the old stuff with the new stuff some other guys created. And since noone rewrites the old software parts, cuz it's simply not 100% necessary, both code quality and security are taking hits.

I really hope we soon reach a new level at which we could then tay for another 10 years maybe.
But thinking about fast progress in Augmented Reality as a new featured device as well as speech services like Amazon Alexa or the rivals from microsoft and google, there wil be huge changes.....
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 10:30:02 PM
Quote from: Sorunome on April 02, 2017, 07:15:19 PM
I think the biggest problem the web-dev area has currently is that it is changing too fast, so if you learn something new now you know that it will be already obsolete next year.
Which is annoying for North Americans, where university costs an arm and a leg. Imagine spending thousands of dollars to study something, only to find out it's obsoletr 2 years later.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Yuki on April 03, 2017, 04:54:06 AM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 10:30:02 PM
Quote from: Sorunome on April 02, 2017, 07:15:19 PM
I think the biggest problem the web-dev area has currently is that it is changing too fast, so if you learn something new now you know that it will be already obsolete next year.
Which is annoying for North Americans, where university costs an arm and a leg. Imagine spending thousands of dollars to study something, only to find out it's obsoletr 2 years later.
Thing is, when you go in college or university, you learn the basics, things that probably won't change in 100 years like how to work in teams and basic programming, then you learn to learn. At the end of your formation, they expect you pick up a new thing they never even mentioned in your formation and you know how to discover how it works. In other areas like medecine, they actually require you to attend some formation courses every 2 years or so just to keep you updated on the latest procedures. But yeah, it's mostly impossible to show everything in a 3-4-year formation.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 04, 2017, 08:47:13 PM
well a proper company that isnt just working on support but is also developing their own products should send their employees to meetings and stuff to learn more about current technologies.
At least in Germany you see this very often. (In my example, I was sent to the "Alexa Bootcamp" in Munich to learn about Amazon Alexa (voice service) for two days).
I think this is necessary if a company doesnt want to end up having only employees that dont know about the latest technology ^^
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Travis on April 22, 2017, 09:08:16 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 02, 2017, 04:29:37 PMNow to be fair, I don't miss tables in the slightest. Divs are much eaiser to deal with. But I wish the div/CSS3 era came out way back then. Would have been epic.

I feel it depends on exactly what you're trying to achieve. I can't always seem to get non-table boxes to do exactly what I want when laying them out horizontally without occasionally resorting to adding CSS rules to make them display like table cells, though maybe it's just me. (For instance, trying to get them to use all horizontal space while spreading their space in particular proportions comes to mind.) But for other types of layout or organization, they work pretty well. I haven't managed to really get the hang of floats, either, let alone stop them from doing awful things like overlapping each other if there doesn't happen to be enough space (and I hate seeing this problem happen frequently on sites I visit, making everything unreadable).

What I do like about external CSS files is that they greatly simplify the HTML and come closer to the ideal of separating content and presentation (though it's not perfect, as I sometimes seem to run into limitations in CSS that end up require me to at least slightly alter the HTML anyway).

What I hate is that it can be darn confusing trying to get things to line up exactly how I want and the fact that browsers tend to vary in their interpretation and support of CSS rules (though this seems to have improved a bit over time).

I also hate how the standards developers seem to have forgotten what HTML was originally intended for: to render text on a device-independent basis, not to be an absolute pixel-perfect page-layout engine. Meaning, presentation and style elements were intended to be optional, as not all clients (or users—consider sight-impaired people using screen readers) support them. Very limited text-only devices were supposed to be able to render the text in alternate ways the best they could, and the content was intended to still be usable. Today, we have nonsense like fixed-width layouts and increasing numbers of sites designed to completely break when I enlarge the text size for accessibility reasons. The "full site" zoom (which scales the entire page instead of just the text) isn't usually adequate because so many sites apparently think it's cool to use a fixed-width layout (often making their lines of text already way too many characters long for comfortable reading, just to add insult to injury) so that it results in horizontal scrolling to read every single line, making the site go from barely legible to pretty much unusable.

The current HTML standards seem to place the full weight of making a proper device-independent and accessible site on the web developers, either making it far more work or providing features that encourage them not to bother. As a result, Web accessibility is a huge hit-or-miss mess.

Thank goodness they had the sense to make CSS so that it can be trivially overridden by the user. It's a pain, but if I have to, I at least have the option to apply my own rules in my browser to whip a messed-up site back into some kind of usable state.

I also really dislike how half the sites nowadays require JavaScript to be usable at all. Sure, interactive content legitimately requires it, but there's no excuse for sites with static content that give you nothing but a blank page if you have JavaScript off. More and more web sites are turning into "apps" (even those that really don't need to be), but, since really good programmers are fairly rare, there are huge numbers of sites that require JavaScript for things that shouldn't need it, or use it just to do really annoying things (like lightbox nags and ads, after the original pop-ups of the '90s were already considered by virtually everyone to be bad and blockers developed for damn good reasons), or do it such a horrible way that it doesn't work properly at all or requires 500 GB of RAM and several decades of CPU time to render a couple of lines of text. JS was once considered a mere supplement to HTML; it should have remained that way for the vast majority of pages. It's capable of greatly enhancing and improving the usability of web pages, but sadly I always seem to encounter far more cases of it making them as difficult to use as possible instead. On the bright side, at least it's just JS and not Flash. :P
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Yuki on April 23, 2017, 07:50:13 AM
As a professional web developer, I definitely agree. Sure, styling has been done directly in early HTML, but once CSS came out, this allowed for a separation of style and semantics, which is what the W3C and its working groups always advocated for. HTML5 even added a ton of tags used purely for semantics. So, theorically, your HTML should only contain your content with its semantics and you should be able to completely change your website using only CSS. A good example is the CSS Zen Garden, your site should pretty much be coded the same way. And, of course, JavaScript should be used for interactivity and special validation, and even then, you can do some in CSS.

Nowadays, sure, some websites are coded well (and that's what I do), but others will only think about maximizing their SEO, ad money and views from social networks. Well, it works, but at the cost of web standards and readability. So yeah, the winning formula is

1. clickbait title so the user will be tempted to click on it
2. separate the content in several pages so the ad networks will think the user visited several pages instead of just one
3. put links to even more clickbait so user will be tempted to stay on your cty site or visit other similar sites through ads
4. ????
5. PROFIT

Seriously, nowadays the web tehnologies allows for almost the same stuff you would run as an executable on your computer. Heck, you can even make an entire functional OS only out of Javascript in your browser. And that allows for seriously stunning stuff.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 24, 2017, 07:56:11 PM
Yeah I hate how most websites requires javascript. This won't be a big issue soon due to more powerful computers but it's still an annoyance. As for tables vs CSS, for me it's the opposite. I never could get tables to show up how I want. X.x
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Travis on April 24, 2017, 08:39:08 PM
Yeah, I think the tables thing really depends on exactly what you're trying to do (and maybe even just how you personally think about things when designing a page, sort of like how different people have different programming styles and approaches). Right now, my personal attitude about tables is that, first of all, they're fine if you're just presenting tabular text data (like how tables are traditionally used in print)—that's what they were really intended for. For layout and appearance, it's more proper to use CSS. I've found that using non-table elements works well for certain layout tasks, but for ones where I really do want table-like layout behavior, it's possible to still use divs and such but use CSS's 'display' property to make the browser display them exactly as if they were tables. This method is nice because I get all the table-like behavior and (IIRC) it has good browser support. Opinion on whether it's "proper" seems to be divided, but IMO there's nothing wrong with it because you're not literally using tables for layout in the HTML and you're still using CSS as it was intended: to dictate presentation. (And if it is somehow "bad", the W3C shouldn't have included it in the CSS standard in the first place, so there. :P)

I believe there is a "flex-box" thing that's supposed to provide some of the flexibility of the old tables, but browser support doesn't yet seem as widespread as the method I just mentioned.
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: c4ooo on April 24, 2017, 08:42:21 PM
Quote from: Juju on April 23, 2017, 07:50:13 AM
Heck, you can even make an entire functional OS only out of Javascript in your browser.
Javascript based linux kernel anyone?
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Yuki on April 24, 2017, 09:25:54 PM
If you use a modern browser like 97% of Internet users (https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox), flex-boxes should work correctly by now. CSS is enough powerful nowadays you no longer need tables to position anything.

Quote from: c4ooo on April 24, 2017, 08:42:21 PM
Quote from: Juju on April 23, 2017, 07:50:13 AM
Heck, you can even make an entire functional OS only out of Javascript in your browser.
Javascript based linux kernel anyone?
Pretty sure it's been done already. Or at least a port of QEMU (http://bellard.org/jslinux/).
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 24, 2017, 10:15:23 PM
Quote from: c4ooo on April 24, 2017, 08:42:21 PM
Quote from: Juju on April 23, 2017, 07:50:13 AM
Heck, you can even make an entire functional OS only out of Javascript in your browser.
Javascript based linux kernel anyone?
Pretty sure Alvajoy would go for this ^^
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 25, 2017, 03:47:17 AM
In BASIC? O.O
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 25, 2017, 11:31:56 AM
wait... He does basic? I thought he was going for Assembler Language...?
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 25, 2017, 04:27:14 PM
I was kidding but yes he uses TI-Basic :P
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: p2 on April 25, 2017, 08:53:31 PM
did someone tell him about the TI Planet contest? He's rather new so he might not know ^^
Title: Re: Remembering back when web design standards did not suck
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on April 26, 2017, 07:06:59 PM
I dunno if he saw the topic

Edit by p2: I hate this "Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk" >.<