bd139 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 1:34 pm
tggzzz wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 12:54 pm
bd139 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 31, 2022 2:19 pm
To note on layout, due to the aspect ratio of screens these days it is generally more visually appealing and typographically correct if you set a max-width on the content container.
That's for
me to decide, not some effin PFY with Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
Canonical example: the RS site. Each displayed item has a large number of parameters I will use to select the subset that interest me. So what do the PFY cretins do: put the displayed items inside a horizontally scrolled box - and limit the box width to half my browser width. Result: more horizontal scrolling than is necessary.
EDIT: I've just gone to try to make a screenshot, and they've made the website even more unusable! Now each item's characteristics occupy the
entire and
predefined screen width. All parameters are compressed into single box, written vertically. It is now impossible to scan vertically to see the differences between items.
Do they think that people use their smart phones to select components and order?
Actually it's not for you to decide
The intent is that HTML contains the content, and my display device defines how the content is viewed. My browser+screen will display it in a different way to your browser+screen or a browser with a tiny horizontal screen (+phone) or browser with a tiny vertical screen (+phone).
really other than by walking away from things that offend you or overriding whatever garbage they send you. Tis the nature of the web.
And that is what I will do; my life is too short to be spend time running into the 7+-2 limitations of my brain!
Lets be clear though, there is a clear distinction between the problems with pure content delivery based web sites and web applications. You're complaining profusely about the latter which I completely agree with and will get onto in a minute. From a pure layout and typography perspective you're usually at the mercy of someone who is following one of the many design fads out there.
What I consider the canonical example of reasonable typesetting is Ham Radio Magazine (late 1960s, early 1970s):
...
This is a lost art which surely should be applicable to the web. Obviously as you can see that doesn't allow you to define the shape of the page at all otherwise you'd lose a lot of the contextual continuity.
You're missing the key points:
- screens and paper are fundamentally different
- *paper format is the same for all viewers
And that's exactly what people are doing when they fix the max-width or use a carefully designed responsive layout.
Firstly they introduce unnecessary problems, and secondly it isn't carefully designed for technician/engineers (Arguably it is for graphic designers wanting to win an award or get praised by other non-technician/engineers)
But quite frankly there are two problems we have with this whole web business which are the elephants in the room:
Firstly, it's a shitty platform on which to deploy applications. It really is garbage.
Generic applications yes, but this is a catalogue with a basket attached. I (+4 others) won an FT award in 1999 for getting that right! Rocket science then, not now.
The whole damn thing is held together with sticky tape, string and poo all slapped on to roughly form a technological demagogue for society to worship. This is propelled along mostly by 3-4 companies with dubious motivation who bought up everyone involved in it and supported by hoards of people defending the income stream it created through shovelling excrement and persuading people they like it. It should at the very highest level have been used to deliver content and nothing more. The moment someone added forms and CGI and Javascript and XHR it went down the toilet rapidly. Several years on, RS pops up with that steamer and here we are. Oh and don't get me started on people leveraging the stack to communicate data through it; that's a completely different and even larger rant. I'll leave it at this glorious bit of simplified JSON returned from an HTTP GET I encountered recently...
Even in 1999 it was obvious that RPC over HTTP (i.e. SOAP) was a crap concept, and that REST was the way to go.
The worst I heard of was someone who found their nail. The task was to get an occasional blob of structured text from applications on one UNIX box to another, all of which was owned and operated by the same individuals. The solution was for the data source to plonk the text in an SQL database, and the data receiver polled the database to see if the table had grown.
More generally, try to have a chat with the average resource to see if they know what's between the code they emit and electrons. Get them to count the number of alternating sync-async protocols on their way down.
Secondly, the art of publishing really still only works for static layouts and those are best read as such. What was intended versus what appears should be the same. Print out a nice LaTeX generated PDF and the print out a web site with the same content and you'll get what I mean.
Really where we should be (IMHO) and it's fundamentally a world without web browsers:
1. Applications for communications and commerce. IRC, Mail clients, Usenet clients, store applications.
3. Content location, indexing and file delivery service. Think Gopher + directory rather than search but something a little more up to date.
4. Actual tangible content delivered via single PDFs.
Note that the thought of content delivered by PDFs probably gives Windows users a headache but on other platforms it's usually a first class built in feature and it's as smooth as butter.
I've recently tried an Amazon Kindle, where the Amazon store contains a few PDF readers. One costs £6. The others want to receive messages from Google/Amazon/whoever, edit the pdf, know the OS has finished booting, prevent the screen dimming, prevent the xomputer sleeping, access the camera, access the vibrator(!), record audio, access GPS location, get information about currently running tasks and screenshot them. WTF!
Summary of the above: it is nappy-wearing PFY graphic designers, all the way down.
