Comment by ommunist
10 years ago
As a front end practitioner, I must defend my point. Otherwise there will be no jobs for me around, everyone will be happy focusing on their tasks. But what to do. Books once had nice initial letters which were difficult to read, but looked great and were object of meditation per se. Over the centuries books became utility, and now you can rarely see even a drop cap, not to say elaborate title glyph. The same appears in the websites look and feel, with greater speed. Although you may be right when you apply your point to the web app, but I completely disagree when we are talking about the visual identity. Identities should never be bootstrapped. And yes, standardisation was one of the pillars of the communism. If you look into the history, you shall see who was the longest seating chairman of the ISO.
Let people act similarly if they want to, and differently if they want to. What's the problem? It is not as if people are forbidden from putting fancy graphics at the start of their texts, and, some do? I mean, not as fancy, sure, but there is nothing stopping someone from making an individual copy of a book like that, and, if there was cause to, it could be mass produced.
I mean also the printing things are probably not designed to have like, shiny inks and such, so with mass producing books, its harder to do the unique printing of the first character, but if /could/ be done. Just, no one wants to badly enough.
Its the free market.
Personally, I prefer even simpler sites than this one, for the most part. (Unless the site does something, I'm not sure I think that js is really needed at all, unless you want an analytics thing.)
That is, unless the other things on the site are the point of the site, in which case of course more stuff is nice.
I don't think its true that preferring a simpler format for the information is necessarily a preference for a lack of aesthetics, but rather a different aesthetic preference.
You know the general way that webpages of students on university websites often look?
At addresses like cs.schoolwebsite.edu/~JRandom/index.html ?
Usually a blank white background, black text, a bit of formatting, but not very much, works fine on pretty much any browser you could think of?
I think there is a specific aesthetic to these sorts of pages, and I personally appreciate that aesthetic.
I don't think that that aesthetic should be considered to be an illegitimate aesthetic choice.
You're tilting at windmills.