[HN Gopher] Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
Author : panic
Score : 347 points
Date : 2025-05-29 07:33 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cybercultural.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybercultural.com)
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| haha I still have "creating killer websites" in my bookshelf. It
| was a quick buy, never thought of it to become a classic.
| Nevertheless - it was such an experience to see websites designed
| the way the book shows. But, not practical INHO. In my eyes, it
| was just a replication of print media. If one remembers how
| coldfusion worked at that time, or, dreamweaver -> some things
| are clearly borrowed from quark express (DTP software). Like to
| remember the times, though. And never went the road of designing
| sites.
| larodi wrote:
| Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this
| off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of
| time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web)
| with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to
| ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these
| people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB.
| Perhaps they were the top designers for print, which was
| commendable, but web is not print.
|
| 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 wrote:
| There are elements of truth in your comment, but it just
| seems weirdly derisive. The way the web evolved to where it
| is now happened in a similar fashion to games, through
| gradual improvement of the underlying platform and people try
| to do anything and everything with it before it was formally
| capable of doing it in a standardized way.
|
| > 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 wrote:
| I never said it didnt take time to mature, neither did I
| say standards were okay from day one. but actually some
| were.
|
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I began my career learning from these folks. I loved sites like A
| List Apart.
|
| 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.
| zeldman wrote:
| Aww.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| > Jeffrey Zeldman -- who turned 42 in early 1997
|
| 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. :-)
| fauria wrote:
| > Warning: In some regions, "View Source" may be illegal.
| Please use it at your own discretion.
|
| Where is "View Souce" illegal?
| yapyap wrote:
| He's probably saying it with a bit of a wink and referring to
| this
|
| https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-
| wo...
| mojo74 wrote:
| Let's have a chuckle...
|
| https://thedailywtf.com/articles/website-hacker
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Heh - I have been in many corporate and government
| environments where the desktop browsers are locked down via
| centralized policies, and not only is "View Source"
| disabled/removed, but so are the "Developer tools"...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us
| in the early 2000s.
|
| But he was!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Another seminal book for me, was _Web Pages That Suck_. They
| actually used to throw shade on _Creating Killer Web Sites_. Lots
| of big egos, back then.
|
| 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.
| lifefeed wrote:
| I loved that site too.
|
| 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.
| ericras wrote:
| That book was seminal for me too and is the genesis for where I
| am today. Flanders' accurate criticism of "mystery meat
| navigation" was incredibly influential for me and still
| reverberates in my mind when I think about usability issues.
| oldpersonintx2 wrote:
| don't forget the greatest webdevs of the late 90s...Larry and
| Sergey
|
| 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
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember thinking that "The Google" was onto something, when
| my friends told me that they were replacing AltaVista with it,
| as their main search engine.
| JimDabell wrote:
| The simplicity was nice, but people switched to Google because
| of PageRank.
| unilynx wrote:
| and not having sponsored links back then
| oldpersonintx2 wrote:
| right, but they could have polluted the google.com page with
| endless garbage based off of the popularity of search....but
| they didn't
|
| 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
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You have a point. Here's what Alta Vista looked like.
|
| 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.
| giantrobot wrote:
| When AltaVista first appeared its landing page was much
| sparser than that. Even a year earlier [0] its homepage
| was pretty sparse and simple. Unfortunately AltaVista got
| hit with the web portal bug and the site got more
| bloated. Unfortunately the search also got worse as
| spammers figured out how to game its search algorithms.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/19980423064646/http://alt
| avista....
| vanschelven wrote:
| This article put Nielsen in the corner of "technically correct",
| but the influence he had on me at least was a strong focus on
| "empirically correct". i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on
| what kind of things work to convey information. He did this to
| the detriment of "looking good", which is why his stuff ended up
| looking "hopelessly outdated", but I think he was on the right
| side of the fight.
| dcminter wrote:
| He did a book ("Designing Web Usability" I think) with an
| unconventional layout and it clearly hadn't been user-tested as
| it had a flaw (text too close to the binding) that made it
| ironically hard to use.
|
| I think he was on point with a lot of stuff, but I've been a
| bit jaded ever since!
| jmisavage wrote:
| I thought the same thing of his website when he first hit the
| scene. Great info, but the design was so bad it made it
| difficult to read. It was quick though, and today's reader
| view would have fixed that issue. Being usable doesn't mean
| zero design; everything needs to work together.
| karohalik wrote:
| It's kind of ironic that Nielsen's site and even his book
| layouts were often frustrating to use. But maybe that
| proves his own points.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I took a number of courses from the NNG Group, over the years,
| including from Nielsen and Tog (I don't think Don Norman ever
| gave classes).
|
| It taught me great respect for usability.
|
| Designers _hated_ Nielsen.
| kristianc wrote:
| Yes, to be fair, Nielsen essentially has had the last laugh.
| Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and
| ruthless minimalism, and the full Flash intro page is a
| relic.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| The full flash intro page is only a relic because Apple
| dropped support for Flash. Now, so many designers have a
| full page video that play, and prevent text from loading
| until every bit of bloated JavaScript finishing downloading
| and executing.
|
| It's a different package, but it's the same junk.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I despise the full-background, 4K video pages.
|
| 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.
| bandoti wrote:
| My biggest pet peeve these days is a Nav Bar that takes
| up too much vertical space and follows when I scroll.
| Usually these are mobile-first designs, but especially on
| phone when I rotate to view more horizontal content using
| iPhone 13 I've got like two text lines visible!
| krupan wrote:
| "Simple navigation, consistency, fast loading times, and
| ruthless minimalism"
|
| 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
| mikeryan wrote:
| I think most practical designers saw the value of what
| Nielsen was showing but hated how he completely eschewed
| aesthetics. Fortunately the advent of CSS and the need for
| responsive mobile design forced everyone to learn how to
| integrate functionality with aesthetics.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users
| hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen
| has designers hating him, and users matter much more than
| designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
|
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| He was a great teacher, as well. Not sure if he still gives
| classes.
| lelandfe wrote:
| > the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus
|
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| He was (still is, I believe) NOT a fan of the Dock:
| https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
| matsemann wrote:
| Same. A pretty button is useless if it's not where you expect
| to find it. You can always make it "less dated" later by
| changing colors and stuff, but the usability is the most
| important part.
|
| 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".
| ale wrote:
| Nielsen was mostly concerned with labeling himself a "guru" to
| boost his consultancy firm. The idea of user-driven design goes
| all the way back to the late 60s with the rise of Participatory
| Design.
| kome wrote:
| Fully agree. And we all know beautiful but totally broken UIs
| and UX, and "ugly" but extremely functional UIs and UXs, that
| actually make them beautiful
| scoot wrote:
| And UIs that are neither beautiful nor function (looking at
| you Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and many other "Enterprise"
| applications).
|
| 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.
| Avicebron wrote:
| If an 'Enterprise' applications website were functional
| people would be able to navigate to assistance when using
| the app. Therefore costing money in competent support techs
| or improving the product itself, neither of which are as
| easy as just being anti-competitive and monopolistic
| scoot wrote:
| I was referring to the web applications themselves,
| rather than the marketing, documentation, or support
| websites. In large vendors, those tend to come from a
| different part of the organisation, so are often superior
| to the products themselves.
|
| 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Back then, it felt like he was one of the rare few people who
| was actually focused on serving the needs of the user. Those
| were the days when too many sites thought it was a good idea to
| show a Flash splash screen before entering a site, and
| designers seemed to have a grudge against text that was big
| enough for a normal person to read.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy
| splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen".
|
| Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
| ftio wrote:
| 8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.
|
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Search for Artwiz under Unix. Same feelings.
| pavlov wrote:
| 8pt Tahoma, lowercase, and using colons for decoration,
| like this: :: news :: contact :: last
| updated 2000-07-31 ::
| 508LoopDetected wrote:
| Yep! I'm guilty of continuing to use the double-colon
| separators to this very day. Just shipped an internal app
| for my company a few months ago that utilizes them in
| page titles.
| bradly wrote:
| > 8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.
|
| So good it is bug when it 8pt Tahoma looks off:
| https://github.com/jdan/98.css/issues/10
| jszymborski wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Shout-out to Geeklog, Textpattern, and the monstrosity
| that was PHPNuke.
| rescbr wrote:
| Well, the screen resolutions and pixel densities of that
| time also made those micro bitmap fonts to be not so micro.
|
| I miss it too.
| mikeryan wrote:
| Serious lack of anti aliasing contributed too.
| cut3 wrote:
| That 2Advanced flash intro tho...
| mvkel wrote:
| I can still hear the music
| msla wrote:
| It seems the next battle we'll have to fight is for fonts
| that actually present enough information to the user to
| disambiguate "Weird Al" from "Weird AI". Seems like we used
| to have these things called "serifs" but modern design knows
| nothing of such heresies.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Actually, Weird Al could see so far into the future that he
| called himself that on purpose.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| When I imagine what he would think of the current internet it's
| really mind-boggling.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _i.e. doing actual tests (with humans) on what kind of things
| work to convey information._
|
| E.g., "Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users":
|
| * https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-
| test-w...
| peblos wrote:
| I realise I'm judging the book (and possibly the authors) by
| the cover but Nielsen's book cover is objectively more
| readable.
|
| It's also probably the only one that would still look new, or
| current, if it was released today
| karohalik wrote:
| It seems like one is stuck in the past for good (well, the
| author and the book I suppose).
| shidoshi wrote:
| Yeah, strong agree here. Nielsen brought a certain weight of
| rigor to the debate back in those days which made sense to the
| way I wanted to think about web design as an engineer. I don't
| really think there's a "winner" or "most right" person amongst
| the trio, but Nielsen's ethos appealed to me more than the
| others mentioned.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I always had more respect for Nielsen's lineage of human-
| computer interaction than I did for Nielsen himself. At the
| time I remember thinking how neither designers nor classic HCI
| people (or programmers) really got the web. Nielsen was at
| least focused on the web, but the problem is that he was
| fixated on user expectations for a brand new medium without
| recognizing that it was early days and would inevitably evolve.
| He would say stuff like "hyperlinks should always be blue and
| underlined" because that's what users expect, without realizing
| that at that point in time we were still so early in the
| adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply such rigid
| rules.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Ben Shneiderman's the "hyperlinks should always be blue" guy.
| ;)
|
| 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...
| eadmund wrote:
| Honestly, I believe that the Web would have been better had
| we stuck to those expectations more diligently and evolved
| more slowly and thoughtfully. That one can does not imply
| that one should.
|
| 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!
| dasil003 wrote:
| I don't disagree with the opinion, but what individual
| experts think does not factor in much when you have a
| groundswell of adoption like the web did. At that point
| people are going to hack whatever they can on top of it,
| and there are too many varied interests to have any central
| control, and so things just evolve well beyond the intent
| or control of any individual mind or architect.
|
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| "hyperlinks should always be blue and underlined"
|
| this honestly make life so much easier...
| eviks wrote:
| Why didn't he say the same thing about links:
|
| > 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?
| jt2190 wrote:
| > He would say stuff like "hyperlinks should always be blue
| and underlined" because that's what users expect, without
| realizing that at that point in time we were still so early
| in the adoption of the web that it made no sense to apply
| such rigid rules.
|
| 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.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| In creating documents with hyperlinks for training
| students, I have found blue underlined still catches the
| most fish, for example some do not realize that accordion-
| style content can be clicked to reveal more content if it
| is not blue underlined. Have tested icons, highlighting,
| different colors of underlining.
|
| 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.
| mvkel wrote:
| It depends on how you define the "fight."
|
| 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?"
| calmbonsai wrote:
| I didn't believe that Discount Usability Engineering was useful
| until we tried it. I was absolutely blown away by the results
| and have continued the practice for _every_ design and re-
| design. Thank you Mr. Nielsen.
|
| The old UseIt.com
| https://web.archive.org/web/19990125092506/http://useit.com/
| will forever live rent-free in my brain.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| On the web, the user is rarely a monolith. For a lot of
| websites (as compared to, say, business software or
| automobiles), the user could be everyone and anyone. They may
| all have different mental models, expectations, abilities, etc.
|
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> On the web, the user is rarely a monolith._
|
| 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)
| alphadelphi wrote:
| Great books. One of the authors looks like now is a climate
| denier, so I wonder myself about the existance of technical
| approach detached from the scientific one
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Which one is that? Let me guess: the one who's into blockchain
| now?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Zeldman is dead*, and Nielsen is still running NNG. I don't
| think he's interested in getting into politics. Enough people
| hate on him, just for being the skunk at the graphic design
| picnic.
|
| * _[EDIT] I'm wrong.
|
| Glad to be wrong.
|
| 'E's not dead. 'E's pining._
| adregan wrote:
| Zeldman is dead?! Did it happen in the last 24hrs? He
| posted on his site yesterday
|
| https://zeldman.com/
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Maybe I'm wrong.
|
| 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._
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Also I'm happy to hear he's alive, and to infer that he's
| not the crazy climate change denying crypto bro!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I hate on Jakob Nielsen for recommending pizza menus over
| pie menus and hamburger menus! ;)
|
| 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.)
| extra88 wrote:
| Nielsen hasn't been at NNG for a couple of years and I
| don't think he was fully engaged in the years before that
| (Norman isn't there either).
|
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This shameful comment just reflects your own biases and
| judgemental nature.
|
| There is absolutely no credible reason for you to lump
| climate deniers in with people who are interested in a
| particular kind of new, decentralized economy. I think you
| need to touch grass.
| tclancy wrote:
| While we still have it?
| vr46 wrote:
| I enjoyed Zeldman's A List Apart, and had no idea that he was so
| old at a time that we were all in our mid-twenties, I thought he
| was our cohort :D
|
| 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.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| That early 2000s CSS/design blogosphere was such an interesting
| place; I was just in high school at the time but loved
| following Dave Shea, Andy Budd, Doug Bowman, Shaun Inman, Mike
| Davidson, and probably a whole bunch more I'm forgetting now.
| rudasn wrote:
| There was also this guy, don't remember his name, whom you
| could email your questions/issues etc, reply with great
| detail and post the discussion on his website for others to
| learn from. Like a one on one precursor to stackoverflow.
|
| 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 :)
| squidbeak wrote:
| A group who never seem to be mentioned in these threads are
| Jason Arber, Richard May and Rina Cheung. Pixelsurgeon was
| enormously influential in its day.
| fowkswe wrote:
| All those guys. Also, the daily visits to lnkedup.com
| k10k.net, designiskinky.com, newstoday.com were so
| influential and informative to me (wow, just did an
| archive.org lookup of some of those and got a nostalgic chill
| - https://web.archive.org/web/20050303092717if_/http://www.li
| n...).
| vr46 wrote:
| K10k! "Newstoday" - Miss that jingle!
|
| Made a friend on k10k back in, maybe 2001, still friends.
| Texted her a few days ago. Never met yet.
| vr46 wrote:
| I remember Shaun Inman, did he do Mint?
| onli wrote:
| The users were also different back then. It was not only about
| putting it all on one page, but even about putting it all above
| the fold, based on the today astonishing fact that many users
| did not scroll down. Because they did not know they could, with
| later experiments observing a tipping point when scrolling
| became normal.
|
| 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.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I'm not sure that realization was great, given how often I
| have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find information on a
| business web site that should be front and center -- things
| like location, phone number, hours, etc.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| As I recall, Greenspun skewered Siegel. Siegel advocated a two-
| or three-stage "entry portal" to your site in one version of
| his "Killer" books, and Greenspun thought that was daft.
|
| 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."
| giantrobot wrote:
| > 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
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| Wow - just visited A List Apart for the first time in some
| years and it looks vastly different. Also, there is a post on
| the home page from a year ago tomorrow that has a new tag on
| it. Times have changed I guess.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| The colour choices in the image with caption beginning "Jeffrey
| Zeldman's homepage, March 1997" are hard on my eyes. However, the
| point might have been to show folks how to exert control over
| colours and fonts, as opposed to actually communicating. The 90s
| were quite a different thing than whatever we call the present
| decade.
|
| 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 ca change.
| detritus wrote:
| It was all about ads back then too, they just weren't so
| targeted.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't think we can judge a screenshot of Zeldman's site using
| today's displays. You are not now seeing what people saw then.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Some random asides on this slice of nostalgia:
|
| > 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
| 640x480, then we designed for 800x600, then we designed for
| 1024x768. 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.
| mjaniczek wrote:
| I'd love to see this sort of design history, but for old
| terminal/text-mode GUIs (TUIs?). I'm too young to have
| experienced it outside of the odd DOS cash desk at a grocery
| store. Does any book/website exist about these? VT220 library
| systems etc...
| WillAdams wrote:
| I believe it gets discussed a bit in some Cobol programming
| texts and ISTR it being discussed in _The Viewport Technician_:
|
| 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.
| plun9 wrote:
| Now David Siegel has changed his opinion on climate change. He
| created a website with independent climate research:
| https://www.cuttingthroughthenoise.net
| alphadelphi wrote:
| indeed, it is indipendent from scientific consensus
| oblio wrote:
| LOL
|
| 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.
| ViscountPenguin wrote:
| Thank god the web design sucks, otherwise someone might listen
| to it!
| hbarka wrote:
| I think it was more than three, I don't recall the reference of 3
| horsemen being used. Lynda Weinman and Seth Godin were
| influential (Godin from a marketing and SEO perspective). Also
| Krug and Allsop.
| meigwilym wrote:
| Also Molly.com
| ngneer wrote:
| I was doing web design in the early days. I recall the thrill of
| thinking how the possibilities were endless.
|
| This article reminds me of "A List Apart". That website is still
| running, incidentally.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Evolt finally shut down last year:
|
| 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:
|
| https://browsers.evolt.org
|
| And that was back when browsers had their own rendering engines
| and they weren't all based on Blink, Gecko, or WebKit!
| donatj wrote:
| I yearn for the early days when I could just "View Source" to see
| how something neat on a page worked.
|
| 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.
| squidbeak wrote:
| It's still a pleasure to explore HTML and CSS on any creatively
| made site that isn't a js machine. Modern CSS is incredibly
| rich.
| simonw wrote:
| Did you poke around in that CSS Minecraft thing recently? One
| of the best view source experiences I've had in years:
| https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft/tree/main
| tclancy wrote:
| I always wonder how old I will be before I forget you could only
| nest tables 7 levels deep in Netscape Navigator 4.
| rchaud wrote:
| I liked Zeldman's designs and writing style the best of these 3
| guys. Imagine my shock a few years ago when I visited his site
| again and saw a hideous Wordpress default theme on it. The
| article mentions that there'll be a new design coming soon, but I
| can't help but feel Automattic forced him to use their in-house
| design when he started working there.
| telesilla wrote:
| >invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs
|
| The instant marker of my generation
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've got an invisible single pixel gif tattoo! It's right above
| my invisible embedded G4 tracking chip.
| adregan wrote:
| The irony that web art history (design, ux, &c.) is so much more
| difficult to study and appreciate--compared to traditional forms
| --when it should be the easiest, always surprises me.
|
| 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.
| mgr86 wrote:
| > I'd argue that his pragmatic approach to web design --
| combining web standards with design flair -- was what won out
| during the 90s and early 2000s. Certainly, of the three web
| design gurus in 1997, Zeldman's website back then was by far the
| most interesting and exotic. --
|
| 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.
| eadmund wrote:
| > Useit didn't change its design over the years. By the Web 2.0
| period, it was seen my most in the web design profession as being
| hopelessly outdated.
|
| 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.
| Maro wrote:
| Such nostalgia -- in the seconf half of the 90s I was 15-18 years
| old, and I was reading these books trying to become a kick-ass
| "Web Designer/Developer". I quickly realized "Web Designer" is
| not for me, I have no sense for pixels, I need to focus on the
| "Web Developer" side. Learn "DHTML" and how to make things work
| on both IE and Netscape! IE back then had JScript, which was not
| exactly Javascript, or EcmaScript, which is what you said if you
| wanted to flex :)
| subpixel wrote:
| "His current website, cuttingthroughthenoise.net, shows that he
| now has a variety of business and personal interests."
|
| That is a funny way to not mention that he is a hard-core climate
| change denialist.
| replwoacause wrote:
| Whoa you weren't kidding. Right from the first paragraph on the
| main page: "Humans are not destroying Earth or the climate. The
| widespread belief in anthropogenic warming is the result of
| political idealism, bad science, faulty data, social
| psychopathy, and greed. There is no climate emergency. The
| Apocalyptic climate narrative is a seriously misleading
| propaganda tool and a socially destructive guide for public
| policy."
|
| What a loon
| absurdo wrote:
| On the flip side, I cherish my torn and beaten up copy of The New
| Masters of Flash. RIP Macromedia.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Nice. I don't know anyone serious with Flash at that time who
| does not have that book.
|
| 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...
| tunnuz wrote:
| Zeldman was one of my heroes in the 00s. I would argue that the
| list could also include Eric Meyer
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_A._Meyer).
| rglover wrote:
| Still use Eric's CSS Reset 2.0 till this day. Have never found
| anything quite as simple and to the point.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I'm surprised https://alistapart.com wasn't mentioned.
| micheljansen wrote:
| That's by Jeffrey Zeldman
| ExMachina73 wrote:
| Lets be real. The pinnacle of web design was clearly zombo.com
| ok123456 wrote:
| It can do anything.
| gdubs wrote:
| Any article on 90s Web Design gurus would not be complete without
| at least a mention of Jeffery Veen. HotWired completely defined
| the aesthetic of the 90s web, breaking all sorts of conventions
| to create something totally new.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1864
| levmiseri wrote:
| Lovely window into the history.
|
| 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?
| dbg31415 wrote:
| The modern web is sleek and polished, but something's been
| lost. I still remember how cool it felt seeing a clean CSS
| layout for the first time -- text aligned perfectly without
| tables, seamless transitions -- it was magic.
|
| 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.
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| I'd've put Celement Mok on this list as well ...
| erikig wrote:
| Every time I work on a website's UI/UX I have that image of
| Zeldman staring at me from "Designing with web standards"
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...
| 90s_dev wrote:
| Can anyone help me find a specific HTML book? It was the first
| one I ever read, I've been looking for it on Amazon every few
| years and haven't found it yet.
|
| 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?
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Krug belongs on this list.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Make_Me_Think
| replwoacause wrote:
| Great article, a nice trip down memory lane. I still have my copy
| of "The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web"
| somewhere. I know Dave Shea wasn't mentioned, but this book was
| my intro into design on the earlyish web.
| rkaregaran wrote:
| Designing with Web Standards was the bible during the web's
| golden era. Peer's minds were being blown that we could lay stuff
| out without tables and spacers.
| amatecha wrote:
| My personal website from those days landed me a job at one of
| the biggest web firms in my city at that time. Made my own
| design in Photoshop, laid out the page with tables and of
| course the trusty spacer.gif! Good times. Unfortunately the
| archive.org snapshots of my site aren't loading the images,
| even though they used to :(
| qgin wrote:
| My late 90s web designing life was based entirely around
| Zeldman's "Pardon My Icons" collection:
| https://zeldman.com/icon1.html
| t1234s wrote:
| Seeing that Flash screen in the article gave me PTSD
| krupan wrote:
| Such nostalgia, and such a reminder of how awful so many websites
| are now with pop ups asking you to subscribe and/or give feedback
| before you have even had a chance to read anything and content
| that jumps around as JavaScript and images (ads) load. I feel
| like the web has regressed massively in the last few years, and
| we don't seem to have anyone talking about it like those guys
| did.
| cloudpushers wrote:
| Ugh, such a good read as we enter an era where we kind of have to
| build interactions from first principals or else we'll be stuck
| with a clunky search bar and lackluster AI adoption.
|
| 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.
| H1Supreme wrote:
| Although this article references the 90's, it reminded me of the
| truly vibrant web design scene of the early 2000's. I was a
| graphic design (print work back then) student / early in my
| career at the time. Sites like k10k, Newstoday, Praystation, and
| many others jump-started my interest in writing software by way
| of web design. Flash especially.
|
| 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.
| rglover wrote:
| I badly miss this era. It was so happy, positive, and innocent.
| People were really just having fun making stuff and teaching each
| other. Nowadays it all feels very fake and vanity-driven.
|
| Will never forget learning HTML + CSS by reading these guys books
| and constantly refreshing forums like Designer's Talk.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Flash was great, but abused to do bad things (like all good tech)
|
| 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.
| Yhippa wrote:
| It seemed to really lower the barrier for creator to make some
| cool (and really funny stuff) so for that, I'm thankful.
| baw-bag wrote:
| I worked as a Nailgun operative in a Palette factory for a few
| dollars with people shooting nails at eachother for fun. I seen
| turtleshell.com one day and at the time I was like woah.
|
| 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.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| My two favorites in the 2000s (when these books were kind of
| dated already) were Lynda's books/cds and Steve Krug's "don't
| make me think"
| jongjong wrote:
| I remember writing web pages using invisible tables and other
| HTML hacks. I also remember later using CSS hacks and different
| properties for each major browser... Sometimes you would use
| underscores in the CSS property name so that it would be ignored
| by some browsers and not others. You had to test almost every
| styling change you made with at least 3 different browsers. The
| standard wasn't being followed strictly by IE which was dominant
| at the time.
|
| 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.
| yarone wrote:
| Nielsen's "Usability Engineering" was my FIRST EVER Amazon.com
| purchase in June 1998.
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