I got star struck one day when Zeldman emailed me asking for an enhancement to a WordPress plugin I had created. Felt like I’d come full circle.
I’m today years old, realizing that Jeffrey Zeldman was 40+ in 1997. I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s.
“View Source” of their websites was an educational time well spent. Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion.
Starting my career in the early 2000s, and my design and other Flash Works were on the Internet - Zeldman, Siegel, and a lot of others were the heroes. Nielsen was the villain. By the mid-2000s, I had done extensive work for clinics and physicians, delving into accessibility, HIPAA compliance, and other related areas. By then, Nielsen and the likes became the heroes. :-)
Where is "View Souce" illegal?
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wo...
But he was!
I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.
Nowadays everything is so optimized and efficient, I've become nostalgic for the days when webpages sometimes sucked. At least they had personality, even if they were hard to use. It's like cars, I like looking at super old old cars in museums and wondering what all those pedals and levers do, even if I'm happy to not drive them.
people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web
look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess
Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars
for example...they could have dropped some links below the search bar to some homegrown sports site they set up...and that would have become the most popular sports site...its hard for most people to resist that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
Google's simplicity and clarity became part of the brand. No one else was doing that at the time. Even "efficient" designs were maximalist, so extreme minimalism with a splash of colour was a real innovation.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://altavista....
I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a bit jaded ever since!
It taught me great respect for usability.
Designers hated Nielsen.
It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
Makes connecting from bad cells a royal pain.
But some of the dependency libraries can be almost as bad.
I don't like 1MB pages, so a button can be animated.
Modern websites have none of those. It's all pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback before you have even had a chance to read anything, content that jumps around as images (ads) load, and huge blobs of JavaScript. I feel like the web has regressed massively in the last few years
NNGroup "best practices" have been obsolete for at least 15 years, because the purpose of a website is no longer about displaying free information. Websites have become a fully commercial enterprise focused on conversion, so every trick in the book is used:
- Infinite scroll and autoplaying video on social media and blogspam sites
- Layouts shifting after content load because of the Javascript ad delay
- "Other Articles you might like" blocks in the middle of an article
- "Subscribe to our email newsletter" popups/modals everywhere
- "You are reading 1 of x free articles" dickbars
and that's just scratching the surface.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210672
>aidenn0 on Jan 31, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu
>>For example, while moving horizontally to a sub-menu, you can easily cross the width of a single line since it's not easy to move your mouse absolutely steady horizontally (in pro graphic apps you'd usually hold a Shift for that), so instead of moving to a sub-menu, you switch to another item. In a Pie menu that's much harder since as you move further the menu's area increases, so the tolerance is higher
>This is why properly implemented context menus don't strictly require you to move in a straight line. Implementations vary; I just tried it with the firefox context menu on linux and found that, once the submenu was open, I could move the cursor quickly to the submenu on any path, even taking a diagonal line to the most extreme options in it. I have also seen implementations where you had a ever widening path you could take as the cursor moved closer to the submenu, making the active area of the currently selected parent item trapezoidal.
>DonHopkins on Feb 2, 2024 | prev [–]
>That astonishingly clever technique was invented by Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini and described in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines (page 87, "drag delay").
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961306
https://archive.org/details/applehumaninterf00appl
https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter...
>>Two delay values enable submenus to function smoothly, without jarring distractions to the user. The submenu delay is the length of time before a submenu appears as the user drags the pointer through a hierarchical menu item. It prevents flashing caused by rapid appearance-disappearance of submenus. The drag delay allows the user to drag diagonally from the submenu title into the submenu, briefly crossing part of the main menu, without the submenu disappearing (which would ordinarily happen when the pointer was dragged into another main menu item). This is illustrated in Figure 3-42.
>Implementations certainly do vary, but the point is that it's essentially a weird magical non-standardized behavior that isn't intuitively obvious to users why or how or when it's happening. It's extremely difficult to implement correctly (there's not even a definition of what correct means), and requires a whole lot of user testing and empirical measurements and iterative adjustments to get right (which nobody does any more, not even Apple like they did in the old days of Tog). Many gui toolkits don't support it, and most roll-yer-own web based menu systems don't. So users can't expect it to work, and they're lucky when it works well.
>Pie menus geometrically avoid this problem by popping up sub-menus centered on the cursor with each item in a different direction, so no magic invisible submenu tracking kludges are necessary. Don't violate the Principle of Least Astonishment!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
>I think it's important for users to intuitively understand how the computer is going to interpret their gesture, without astonishment, and for the computer to provide high fidelity unambiguous instantaneous feedback of how it will interpret any gesture.
>I like how Ben Shneiderman defined "Direct Manipulation" as involving "continuous representation of objects of interest together with rapid, reversible, and incremental actions and feedback".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface
>>In computer science, human–computer interaction, and interaction design, direct manipulation is an approach to interfaces which involves continuous representation of objects of interest together with rapid, reversible, and incremental actions and feedback. As opposed to other interaction styles, for example, the command language, the intention of direct manipulation is to allow a user to manipulate objects presented to them, using actions that correspond at least loosely to manipulation of physical objects. An example of direct manipulation is resizing a graphical shape, such as a rectangle, by dragging its corners or edges with a mouse.
>Those ideals also apply to pie menus. Pie menus should strive to provide as much direct feedback as possible, via tracking callbacks, previewing the reversible effect of the currently selected item (possibly even using the distance as a parameter), so you can easily use them without ever popping up the menu.
>For both novice and expert users, the directly obvious geometric way pie menus track and respond to input is more intuitively comprehensible, predictable, reliable, and most importantly REVERSIBLE than traditional gesture recognition (like Palm Graffiti, or StrokePlus.net) or "magical" kludges like the submenu hack.
>With pie menus there's a sharp crisp line between every possible gesture, that you can see on the screen.
>But with a gesture / handwriting recognition system, you wonder where is the dividing line between "u" and "v"? The neural net (or whatever) is a black box to the user (and even the programmer). Some gestures are too close together. And most gestures are useless syntax errors. And there's no way to cancel or change a gesture once you've started. And there's no way to learn the possible gestures.
>But with complex magical invisible submenu hacks, you wonder if it's based on how long you pause, how fast you move, where you move, what is the shape, why can't I see it, how does it change, what if you pause, what if my computer is lagging, what if I go back, what if I didn't want the submenu, how do I make it go away, why can't I select the item I want, what do I do?
>But with pie menus, if you make a mistake or it doesn't behave like you expect, you can at least see and understand what went wrong (you were on the wrong side of the line) and change it (move back into the slice you meant to select). No fuzzy gray area or no-man's-land or magic hand waving. And the further out you move, the more "leverage" and precision you have.
>The area and shape of each item target area should not be limited or defined by the font height and the width of the longest label. It should be maximized, not limited, to encompass the entire screen, all the way out to the edges, like the slices of a pie menu. If you move far enough, it's practically impossible to make a mistake, as the target gets wider and wider, so you can even use pie menus during an earthquake or car chase.
Funny enough, this was actually removed in the early versions of OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/1999/12/macos-x-dp2/#:~:text...
But today it seems to be back.
Still, his bite-sized advice stuck around and continues to shape the conversation. That’s where everyone learned about Fitts’ Law, Hick’s Law, optimal text column widths, the value of usability testing with just a few users, and the deep shame you should feel for making text hard to read. He may not have invented those ideas, but his articles popularized them. And because he was one of the few doing serious usability research and publishing it online, his authoritative voice gave those ideas real weight that designers could leverage to make the case to their bosses and clients.
Several of the designers I worked with liked him, in as much as he gave them research to back them in their arguments with clients that the site should actually be usable.
It is still one of the high points of my career that I was part of a team that shipped an internet banking application that worked well in the then-current major browsers of IE 6 and Navigator 4, but also worked in Lynx and on a Palm Pilot browser.
We've now degenerated to the point that "engineers" demand Chrome everywhere.
The Flash 2 screenshot in the article looks dated. But the experience of using it wouldn't change a bit even if it got less 90-sy buttons and looked "modern".
If any of these were functional, most users wouldn't care about the visual appeal. NN were correct, but apparently their message didn't reach that particular sphere of web application developers.
The productivity drain of a poor UI is largely felt by the customers' employees, while the vendor benefits from sales of professional services and premium support contracts.
Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
:: news :: contact :: last updated 2000-07-31 ::So good it is bug when it 8pt Tahoma looks off: https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/10
Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity that was PHPNuke.
I miss it too.
E.g., "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users":
* https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
It’s also probably the only one that would still look new, or current, if it was released today
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811
Seriously, while he was the first to use blue for links in HyperTIES, there was a historical context (like the IBM PC's color palette), and he never meant it in a "640k ought to be enough for anybody" way. His reasons for recommending blue are based on empirical studies, measuring visibility, comprehension, retention, etc.
Blue is good not just because users recognize it (they didn't in 1983), but for how it stands out, because of how the human visual system works. He was originally a fan of cyan aka "light blue".
Ben Shneiderman wrote:
>"Red highlighting made the links more visible, but reduced the user’s capacity to read and retain the content of the text… blue was visible, on both white and black backgrounds and didn’t interfere with retention,"
>"We conducted approximately 20 empirical studies of many design variables which were reported at the Hypertext 1987 conference and in array of journals and books. Issues such as the use of light blue highlighting as the default color for links, the inclusion of a history stack, easy access to a BACK button, article length, and global string search were all studied empirically.”
>"My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted."
HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...
Blue links and purple visited links were fine. And now on most sites there is no differentiation, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is a link, and a lot of sites don’t even bother linking. This is not an improvement!
For me, usability mattered a lot and I saw how a lot of the web design experimentation was falling short, but Nielsen was just too backwards looking. We needed forward thinking UX rooted specifically in web culture, and that's what we got through the Zeldmans, Veens, and 37signals of the era.
The web at the time was an "anything goes" multimedia format, not a dry digital paperback or textbook where all the content had to fit within the publisher's specifications to limit printing, weight and distribution costs.
Nowadays, most browsers have a "reading mode" that can flatten the content into something that satisfies those Nielsen conditions though.
this honestly make life so much easier...
> he was saying that each browser should define how headers would be displayed to their users.
And let the user define the color and underline style?
I always remember recommendations from Nielsen as (a) backed by some testing with real users, (b) temporal, i.e. “at this time users expect…” and ( c) only focused on usability, that is, in practice there are other things to consider like design, performance, etc.
I will say that most of this nuance gets rounded to a Boolean like most advice.
I think part of the issue is that early users of the internet were more tech-savvy, and now internet users are simply "anyone with a phone"—in a sense we're going backwards because a higher percentage of users are not learning/adapting to attempts at new approaches/standards.
In the Nielsen days, two things were happening:
1. People were creating quirky, whimsical, odd corners of the internet for nobody but themselves. Art.
2. Entrepreneurs were starting to build sophisticated web applications for other people, i.e. customers.
Nielsen's dogma was excellent for the latter, and disastrous for the former.
History has been kind to Nielsen in the way that the modern web has lost most/all of its charm for the sake of answering the question "but how does it make money?"
The old UseIt.com https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/ will forever live rent-free in my brain.
This is important to keep in mind when focusing on user centered design for a general purpose website. You need a testing pool representative of your users (or who you want your user to be), you need to figure out what to do if there are conflicts among users, during testing, etc. It might be obvious, and you can probably still fit in into a framework, but what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass. There is still an art to user centered design, and if you have this in mind, your designs don't have to look hopelessly outdated.
Usability folks have understood this for decades. Alan Cooper was writing about defining multiple separate personas [1] to represent different cohorts of your userbase in the 90s.
> what I'm getting at is that it is less empirical than it might seem at first pass.
I would argue that it is still exactly as empirical. You just have to be careful how you aggregate your data and don't try to reduce things to too few clusters. Otherwise you end up making the classic mistake of offering a single T-shirt size at your conference that mostly only fits men because they are the majority of attendees.
> There is still an art to user centered design,
Agreed. No amount of analysis will do your synthesis for you. You still have to make.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)
*[EDIT] I’m wrong.
Glad to be wrong.
'E's not dead. 'E's pining.
I would have sworn there was a big deal about his passing on this site, not long ago.
Happy to be wrong.
[EDIT] Yup. I’m wrong.
Glad to be.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menu-vs-pizza/
Not that I have anything against pizza menus, though -- they do have their place. But we both agree to hate hamburger menus passionately. ("Hate the menu, not the burger.")
PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...
Seriously though, I've always been a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen, especially for his empirical approach, and he has even said some nice things about pie menus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29930500
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/trip-report-chi-88/
>Some new stuff was presented such as the pie menus studied by Callahan, Hopkins, Weiser, and Shneiderman from the University of Maryland. When used as pop-up menus, pies have the advantage that any menu item can be selected by equally small movements of the mouse and the study did indeed show that users performed about 15% faster using a pie menu than using a linear menu. Pie menus also have some potential disadvantages, especially when used with many menu items or in cases that call for hierarchical pop-ups.
>In spite of this and some other novelty items, the main feel of CHI'88 was that of improvements of earlier stuff rather than revolutionary new discoveries. Every year, I am able to summarize the main theme of a CHI conference and this year I am not in doubt that the theme was that we are currently slowed down to steady, evolutionary progress in the user interface field.
This is the paper we presented at CHI'88 that he was referring to (which is why I appreciate his empirical approach to actually measuring usability and performance and error rates):
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked
>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
Don Norman, on the other hand, has never been a big fan of pie menus, and went even further than Jobs just yelling "That sucks!" to explain that was because of all the disasters, pollution, and urban sprawl he thought they could cause, and he even unfairly blamed pie menus for a nuclear meltdown, when a linear menu actually caused it! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37907449
X11 SimCity Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA
Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCPQxJttf0
Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we saw how the pop-up menu that they were doing used pie menus, made it very easy to quickly select the various tools we needed to add to the streets and bulldoze out fires, and change the voting laws, etc. Somehow I thought this was a brilliant solution to the wrong problems. Yes it was much easier to now to plug in little segments of city or put wires in or bulldoze out the fires. But why were fires there in the first place? Along the way, we had a nuclear meltdown. He said "Oops! Nuclear meltdown!" and went merrily on his way."
Hopkins: "Linear menus caused the meltdown. But the round menus put the fires out."
Norman: "What caused the meltdown?"
Hopkins: "It was the linear menus."
Norman: "The linear menus?"
Hopkins: "The traditional pull down menus caused the meltdown."
Norman: "Don't you think a major cause of the meltdown was having a nuclear power plant in the middle of the city?"
(laughter)
Hopkins: "The good thing about the pie menus is that they make it really easy to build a city really fast without thinking about it."
(laughter)
Hopkins: "Don't laugh! I've been living in Northern Virginia!"
Norman: "Ok. Isn't the whole point of SimCity how you think? The whole point of SimCity is that you learn the various complexities of controlling a city."
(My joking but also serious point was that in SimCity "Meltdown" is on the linear "Disaster" menu. So linear menus cause meltdowns. But the pie menus has bulldozers and roads, that you can use to recover from meltdowns with.)
Don't bother with Nielsen today, he's been rambling about how working on accessibility won't matter because AI will create custom UIs for every user.
Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point.
I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date.
Still, fun times, what a great age it was.
I remember email him and asking about why my photo gallery didn't work when I tried to save the "currently selected image" as a cookie. He replied and explained to me that cookies contain string values and that you can't save a reference to a DOM element as a cookie. So, cookie = document.getElementById('image0') will not work, but cookie = 'image0' will :)
Made a friend on k10k back in, maybe 2001, still friends. Texted her a few days ago. Never met yet.
Think about that, what a different environment the sites had to work in. Not only technically, but also socially. Completely normal that details like that don't carry over into today.
I appreciate Nielsen's approach quite a lot. We could do a lot worse than a return to "usability" on the Web. We've gone to a lot of effort to recreate a substantial subset of what Flash brought to the table, but do you really want your photos and text blocks flying in as you scroll? It's cool the first time you see it, but after that? Does anybody ever say "man, this site has great information, I just wish it would bounce around my screen like a Jack Russell terrier."
I always find myself thinking "man if only this website would hijack my native browser scrolling...but terribly". Websites that don't hijack scrolling are just too useful and easy to use. Even better is when paragraphs fade-in as I scroll! Oh man I just love seeing shit jump around as I'm trying to read. It's so calming and doesn't induce seasickness at all!
Maybe the people implementing such things never accidentally saw off their fingertips. /s
A big annoyance of the early web was all the stupid blinking text and pointless little animations. Luckily we've moved past them. Of course, today it's all about ads, which is the tip of a spear that is quite unpleasant.
Plus ça change.
On the typical 15" CRT with its high dot pitch and relatively dark tube that garish yellow would be far less garish. The black, by virtue of the display, would also not be as black and more a very deep grey. The text contrast would also be somewhat comfortable as it would get an anti-aliased effect even though the OS at the time didn't have good font smoothing at the time.
> Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions.
This was before responsive design existed. First we designed for 640×480, then we designed for 800×600, then we designed for 1024×768. Bad developers would design for wider viewports and leave people with smaller screens to scroll horizontally to see everything. Slightly better designers would design for the narrower viewports and leave huge gutters down either the right side or both sides for people with wider screens. Best practice was “fluid design”, where you would define widths in percentages to adapt to the screen width, but it was difficult to get designers on board.
> But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).”
It wasn’t just file size. The early web was limited in terms of colours too. There were 216 “web safe” colours.
> the book advocated for “hacks” to HTML in order to make websites more visually appealing. The primary hacks were using invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs to help control layout.
There were a lot of weird hacks. One was to put many <title> elements in your document, and Netscape 2 would flip between them in the window’s title bar to make a crude animation. The title bar because browsers didn’t have tabs back then.
> CSS support from the two main browsers at the start of 1997 was patchy at best. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the closest to supporting the W3C standard for CSS, but it was buggy and inconsistent.
It was basically nonexistent apart from very minor things. Internet Explorer 3 didn’t even understand the em unit and just treated it as pixels, so if you set something to font-size: 1.5em, it wasn’t 50% larger than the parent element’s text, it was invisibly small.
> As for Netscape, its 3.0 browser had poor CSS support. In fact, the company even tried to create an alternative to CSS, with a JavaScript-powered styling mechanism called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets (JSSS).
Netscape 4 transcoded CSS to JSSS on the fly, which had the side-effect that when you disabled JavaScript, it also disabled CSS.
> For all their differences, CSS and Flash did have similar goals: both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web.
Before web fonts were supported by browsers, one fairly common technique was sIFR, which looked for specially marked up text on the page and replaced the text with Flash applets rendering the text in an embedded font. It was pretty ugly loading and caused bunch of problems, but the designers didn’t mind as long as it let them use custom fonts.
It was a pretty hellish time to be a web developer, but exciting as well. The browser bugs and incompatibilities were a thousand times worse than they are today and could really ruin multiple days at a time on the most trivial stuff, but it was also a period of great inventiveness and variety.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4541460-the-viewport-tec...
Usually though it was a direct display of the program state for a given task, which was part of what made it so efficient --- the task needed to be simplified down into chunks which would fit on/make sense when viewed as text on a text screen viewport.
It looks pretty nice and it's well written and I won't delve deep into the flaws, I'm sure others will.
However one big thing that climate change skeptics/deniers keep missing or handwaving about renewables is that they've never listened to Wayne Gretzky. None of them are skating to where the puck will be. Living in the past is worse for everyone.
I don't have to follow or agree with someone overall to also think that "even a broken clock is right twice a day" :-)
This article reminds me of "A List Apart". That website is still running, incidentally.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240206220342/https://lists.evo...
However their browser archive, where you can download ancient versions of over a hundred different web browsers, is still online:
And that was back when browsers had their own rendering engines and they weren’t all based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit!
Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.
The instant marker of my generation
I try not to profess in mixed company that young designers should know the history of the web (it’s so young after all!), lest I be pegged an old man yelling at clouds. However, there was a time when there was a really interesting intersection of print designers coming to work on the nascent web, asking for the moon, and web developers teasing out compromises because the platform was so limited. Now that the platform is so capable that it could accomplish those designs, we don’t have designers capable of imagining it.
I’d love for a designer to ask me to do something different for a change of pace. There have been many neat APIs that have slowly made their way to CSS over the years sitting unused.
I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.
Oddly enough, I much prefer it to the corporate NNGroup site. And that last version reminds me a bit of HN itself. Simple, clean and usable — really simple, really clean and really usable, not mindlessly aping a trend (and getting it wrong) but intelligently setting its own trend.
I wish more sites adopted that style of design.
That is a funny way to not mention that he is a hard-core climate change denialist.
What a loon
In the early 2000s amazon.com was not in my country, India, but they deliver books for a hefty shipping fee. I bought my first book and the first ever order from Amazon - "Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript" by Branden Hall for a whooping $51.97 (just checked my order history). After a few years, seating in the room with all of the authors, the whos who, and the father of ActionScript at the Macromedia office in Townsend was sureal for me. Spot them here https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/720575940814...
Some point along the way I lost my copy of HotWired Style: Principles of Web Design – so I picked up a new one. It's an amazing time capsule of what that time was like, and even if the technology has changed it's still so interesting to me from a standpoint of working within constraints, and understanding a new medium for itself rather than just as a thing to host the previous medium.
I loved the bright look of the "HotWired" style designs. I found them to be really functional on top of just enjoying the aesthetic. You could get a lot of visual mileage out of a little bit of markup even without images. This was a great feature when most people were on shitty dial-up.
Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?
But now everything feels uniform. Design is so standardized I can’t remember the last time a site genuinely surprised me or made me want to dig into the code or copy it for my own.
It feels like we’re browsing the Walmart music section… efficient, predictable, and totally sterile. I miss the indie record store vibe — quirky, surprising, maybe even a little messy, but full of personality.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...
It must have been released around 1995 or so. It used Mosaic browser throughout all the examples, which looked so different than the IE3 that I was using. There was a heavy focus on forms and controls. And it was hundreds of pages. Familiar to anyone?
Perhaps Nielsen's practices will enjoy a resurgence as it's easier to make personal sites for all sorts of different, non-commercial entities and happenings.
There was a network of sites (like those mentioned above), that had feeds of interesting work done on the web. Much of it was purely an exercise in creativity. The single 1024x768 resolution target let folks go wild without the constraints of responsiveness that we see today.
While I realize that the web had to evolve, I have a lot of nostalgia for web design from those days. The "design" part of it was really centered around artistic expression, and still had a lot of influence from graphic design.
Will never forget learning HTML + CSS by reading these guys books and constantly refreshing forums like Designer's Talk.
The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions.
What it got right:
Design once, looks the same anywhere
reasonably powerful scripting language
Vectors as a first party drawing primitive
abstracted OS hooks
This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life.
There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom.
The closest thing to it now is unity.
Flash was my route out of garbage and I miss it on behalf of younger people. I remember making a circle and keyframes. Attaching bits of code to frames to make it do what I want. Remember living at my moms house in the bath reading Flash Math Creativity or Colin Moock's books. I spent so so long understanding the concept of an Object or a Class or functions that call functions.
I feel that if I went back today, I'd be assaulted by package managers, dependencies, build systems, frameworks. No easy and beautiful way to draw a circle that weekend and animate it to an oval.
It is a real loss.
Stuff moves on and I am a developer, but my interest in motion (Penner! Keith Peters!) gave me a real solid feeling of what feels good with interactivity and motion and sometimes I open that ticket but it is rare. Everything is just the same now and I solve the same problems many of you do over and over again. It's boring. No creativity, no inspiration.
Reading this article reminds me of how many opportunities there were to build useful tools and quickly gain traction and grow a community. Nowadays everything including people's attention has been monopolized and growing a community is not feasible for everyone. This rubs salt into the wound that it's also much harder to create viable, differentiated products due to high competition.
I made a fan website for the movie Matrix, I wish I could see it today. It was awesome. Lots and lots of effects.
http://i.am/supermatrix - was not. =(
I don't have the original URL, just the redirects. GeoCities had weird URL patterns, thus the redirect links. Man, I would pay money to get access to those websites.
theGeatZhopa•1d ago
larodi•1d ago
They did not understand this new medium, the screen, and the fact you don't have to put all the information on the same page. It was not until 2010 perhaps, when things started to flatten and simplify again, that people actually started doing reasonable web design. Usability was a new thing even in 2005, and Apple with their K-12 interfaces did not help this much, even though certain design decisions on System OSs make a lot of sense. But this was not the web.
Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. This is the same for cartography, btw, where things move even slower, and we still getting maps overloaded with information like its 1834.
IMHO, and this may be super unpopular, but game designers and game UI designers served as much more substantial inspiration for the web, rather than these early over-hyped designers, which otherwise did great job for posters and print. Some games are so forward-thinking, and so beautiful in the simplicity of their interfaces, that we can really argue most of the world got where gamers (and demosceners!) already have been for years.
brailsafe•1d ago
> Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated.
People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.
larodi•1d ago
Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps.
Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements.
Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost.
Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web.
ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.