It lasted longer than that. Sketch wasn’t launched until 2010 and it probably took a good five years (at least) for people to switch to that
Let’s be honest, when you came to this site you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Instead the site invites you to simply look around, embrace the excitement of clicking randomly and not really knowing what you’re going to get, and not really caring either. Just be a thoughtless child, wandering a garden yanking leaves along the way. Now isn’t that rejuvenating?
When I need to find a store's operating hours so I can try to dash over after work and before dinner, I don't have time for the Scavenger Hunt in the Garden of Narnia Experience.
I consider the internet something like a library. I want to find relevant stuff, not sift through shit to get to something interesting.
I didn't even know what it had because I was overwhelmed with colors and unusual styles that I clicked around and left. Sure, it's a nice reminder of the old days and some people find it pretty, but it's bad at conveying information imho.
As an example: the modern replacement for this kind of fan-site would be a Fandom.com site, which has an interface full of cruft, focused mostly on ads and "engagement" stuff. Only a small portion reserved for actual content. Unless there is a lot of customization, list pages are often alphabetical and have a terrible design that make it very difficult to find stuff. So you need to use their terrible search that is hidden in a tiny 30x30 button on the top among other buttons.
Plenty of other examples there. For every website like Hacker News, there's dozens of forums whose design is more focused on useless ornamentation, monetization and increasing engagement through stupid tactics.
/edit: and browsers and plugins are our saviours, hail reader mode and not auto-playing videos! I consider that part of the UI/UX development as well.
Also, you mention auto play videos. Those are pretty much a staple of the current website era, with browsers themselves having to fight back [1]. Now, even Reddit's new version has it. Annoying animated gifs and annoying flash were mostly novelties in personal webpages.
If anything, needing ad blockers, reader mode and and anti-autoplay in browsers, is an indication of how things aren't exactly great in the web anymore. And that website from 1999 doesn't need any of those.
My point was that in the early days I couldn't really shape my browsing experience. Now I can because a necessity arose due to websites delivering shit (and imho this started in the early days). So now they are nice. That was my point, not really sure the delivery was on point haha. And with the demise of flash it really got a lot better. But maybe I don't visit shitty websites a lot.
Ah got it! We're in agreement, then. And I also can't live without those tools.
Some sites from the 90s, like the one linked here were ad-free, SEO-free and usable on a browser that is not Internet Explorer, but far from all of them were. I still like their simplicity, especially now that we have modern hardware and broadband connectivity, I don't miss the 56k modems that were part of late 90s experience.
Good times...
/me ducks
Now that there is syntax highlighting though the readability benefit is minimal so not a big deal. I still think SQL keywords should be capitalized though...
You mean you don't like newsletter subscription pop-ups? Or a virtual assistant chat window on the corner? Or auto-playing videos that follow you when you scroll down? Or a choice between "Accept all cookies" and "Learn more?"
And that is just the visible part, actual clickable area is 1px by 1px so even when you correctly click on the "x", you don't actually close it.
This might also be a dark pattern to exploit attention spans compromised by chronic content consumption.
A user sees new content at the top of the page, forgets the content they wanted to see, sticks around to look at novel material.
THEN the user either goes back and gets distracted again, or at the very least, goes back to their intended page.
Also to note, Reddit disabled i.reddit.com (the old mobile site that was snappy) within the last month.
I wouldn’t be surprised if old.reddit.com was next on the chopping block.
The cookie or whatever seems to expire every week or so, then I'm unceremoniously dumped back into the mess that is their "modern" design.
Despite that, the layout of old Reddit is much more information dense. Just use the phone in landscape and it's perfectly fine.
Log in to continue reading this article.
And, oh, you don't want advertising cookies? Here's a list of a dozen categories you have to manually deselect one-at-a-time. To help with this there's a bright-colored button that says, "accept all" and a drab text link that says, "use my selection."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...
Convention had yet to be established in the 90s; anything was fair game.
I suspect we are going to run into the same burnout with AI, and much quicker. Today, "holy shit anything is possible with this magic." Tomorrow, it's going to be as exciting as your average HR drone.
It's a real pity, because the hybrid designs we get now all looks like a bunch of uninspired rectangles.
Mobile-only sites, sure. Desktop-only sites, why not. If you want both, do both instead of making a hideous web design Cronenberg pleading for the relief of death.
Deep cut
However... whenever I see an app or site that has two separate websites, I know I'm in for trouble: sometimes one version will miss some features, and I'll invariably have to request the desktop website. The worst of them was my previous health insurance provider, that only had one very important feature in the mobile version.
Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).
The problem will fix itself.
How are you going to make a site that lets the user display the site as they wish without just making a reflowable mobile-friendly site?
Desktop sites are generally static and have nonfluid components like sidebars which is how fluid design became necessary in the mobile age which seems to be what you are proposing.
>need to zoom and pan to read
over every time I forbidden to pan and zoom by the site author.
Especially when I'm behind 43" 4k monitor and the site decide
WHAT TEN LINES
PER SCREEN
IS EVERYTHING
I WISHED FOR
Developers assume everyone has the latest iPhone or Pixel. So they take like a minute to load, heat my phone up, drop the battery by 10%, and have a 20% chance of OOM-ing my browser.
The Guardian is the absolute worst at this. I don't know why, it brings mobile Firefox to its knees.
Basically, fancy "mobile friendly" JS is no good if it makes my phone stutter and go catatonic.
Whereas if people just wrote old school "CSS Zen Garden" sites, or even this old table stuff, any ancient phone could handle them easily.
But no, I need to go pay a kid to dig up more coltan.
I can scroll. It's ok. What I can't do is will my phone faster, without shelling out more stupid cash.
You might say that old websites were more artisanal while modern websites are more mass produced.