HTML is like a camera
18 points by tno
18 points by tno
It’s Ironic that a website talking about how HTML fundamentals still work today needs a loading page before showing a paragraph of text.
Technically, it doesn’t. If you visit with a UA that doesn’t offer it the ability to show a loading page, like, say, lynx, it just loads the text straight away without the loading page.
If your UA offers it the ability to show a loading page, though, it does so. I’m not sure what that is, but it’s not irony.
You don’t even need to have a different UA. If you browse with JavaScript turned off, it just displays the page, with pretty styling and all. The only difference is the absence of the loading screen and animations. The site is doing the right thing here: graceful degradation.
The animations are useless and annoying, though, and make me instantly dislike the design. But the creator of the claims to be a frontend developer, I assume it is to show off their skills.
It’s like digging out the film camera, burning a whole roll of Portra 400, and going through the hassle of developing and scanning it instead of checking your hair on your phone’s selfie camera.
I appreciate the sentiment but this is only partially correct. A website created in 2000 would still “work” but probably look terrible on modern devices. Making sites that look acceptable on both wide-screen monitors and 6” phones requires some work.
That said, many web sites are way too complicated for what they need to do.
Making sites that look acceptable on both wide-screen monitors and 6” phones requires some work.
Arguably, it takes only the viewport meta element and the famous “100 bytes of CSS”. And I’d add a native font stack. Something like “better motherfucking website” is enough work to look acceptable on a wide range of devices.
You are not wrong but this “100 bytes of CSS + fonts + meta element” is still a burden that non-technical people don’t want to deal with over just messing around with basic HTML.
A++ on website design, B- on content length, although I do a appreciate a short post once in a while
A bit like a film camera, though. We can still see a movie from the 1910s, it just looks odd to us. And I’ve known people who can’t cope with b/w movies or those with pre-MTV cut lengths.
I also just got a used copy of “Eric Meyer on CSS” from 2002. And I have to say, stuff looked pretty okay back then, at least for relatively simple layouts. You had to fake rounded corners or drop shadows, but as those are temporarily out of fashion these days, too, it’s contemporary enough.
(Of course it’s not responsive, but WAP is good enough for mobile devices, right? ;) )
A new camera can make a photo possible because on a complex terrain you need all the optical+digital zoom you can get. Or it can add some impossible to switch off obligatory «enhancement» filters that your photo definitely doesn’t need.
Both can happen with HTML, too (even without scripting layers on top)
I think the rise of HTML and the rise of digital photography mostly coincided, and if you asked someone “in the know” back then if you’d still be able to find film for a 1970s camera, you’d probably get a “no”. The continued (niche) existence of film wasn’t a given.
I think I see a parallel between people who exalt making photographs on film as opposed to digital and those who mourn the lost days of simple HTML as opposed to modern front-end development.