- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. Kev Quirk looks back fondly at Web 1.0.
The web is fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it. Kev Quirk looks back fondly at Web 1.0.
As usual for these people, they seem to hate people with disabilities or those simply older. You know what Web 1.0 “design” (there’s a reason for the scare-quotes, properly designed sites were of course a thing) was? Utterly inaccessible. I won’t cry a single tear for all these horrible unreadable designs, and I barely even have issues (I mainly get overly distracted and annoyed by movement, I disable GIF animations by default and have “prefers reduced motion” active), but for people with more serious issues, it was/is way worse. Now granted, there’s still horrible inaccessible shit on the web today, but it’s far better than it was and especially far better than what these old-web defenders seem to cry to return.
And the best thing? People tend to get worked up when you say you’d like to consume the content without annoying shit. When it’s about JS, everyone applauds you “Yeah, fuck those JS only sites, we want basic text!” but when you say you want basic text without 50000 moving and blinking things? “Fuck you for wanting a sterile web where everything is boring”
/rant
The article acknowledges this in the conclusion (emphasis mine):
Accessibility wasn’t the main topic discussed in the article. It was mostly pointing out that the current web is too centralised.
That’s part of the problem. All these rants about the glory of Web 1.0 are ignoring the fact that Web 1.0 wasn’t usable for anybody with accessibility issues and the modern web is better for them. A tiny acknowledgement at the bottom of their rant shows how they value accessibility lower than all of their other concerns.
I don’t think accessibility is meant in term of disabled people.
I understood it as accessible in terms of technical knowledge. Anyone can whip out their phone and access the internet… or at least use an app which needs internet.
Eternal September is another term for it.
Accessibility almost always refers to disabled people, especially in web development. I’ve never heard anyone in the industry refer to accessibility in any other way, without explicitly making that clear.
If they meant the reading you took from it, that’s even worse and my point is even more pertinent.
Why? The internet is a powerful tool and there are plenty of morons using it without knowing anything about it.
my original point was that the main idea of the article down plays the accessibility gains of the modern web. Your reading was that the author meant a different definition of accessibility and not A11y, which would mean the author didn’t just down play it, they completely ignored it. The author is complaining that the modern web is awful, while ignoring the huge gains for people who need these accessibility features and how awful web 1.0 was for them
I think the author used both meanings at different times.
First time they mention interesting website designs at the cost of accessibility.
But the second time they mean how low the technical barrier is to access the modern (and bland) web and how it tries to caters to lowest common denominator.
The article wasn’t really about Web 1.0 as much as it was about the time that Web 1.0 was around. The author could remove “Web 1.0” and replace it with “late 1990s to early 2000s Internet”.
No, thats just the angle that the article wanted to take. Just because it ignores an aspect of something doesn’t mean that its position is moot.
Are you asking for every article ever to have a section discussing accessibility? I’d rather we let the author speak their mind, and focus on what they want to say.
No. I’m asking that when they complain about how the modern web is “fucked” and web 1.0 was better, they don’t try to act like that is an absolute, since that’s an opinion that is not widely applicable.
Ignoring part of a topic makes your argument weaker.
Again, to write an article means to cut out things that don’t matter to the core argument. You’re asking for the writer to complete a thesis.
And again, this is an opinion piece, not a well developed thesis. What you are asking for is both unreasonable and impractical when writing an opinion piece.
They might have acknowledged it in an aside, but they spent a lot of time giving examples and advocating for exactly the horrible mess that I complained about. The whole section “Web 1.0 design” is about it, and it retuyrns for “Discovering Web 1.0 content in a Web 2.0 world”. Or with the words of the author: “Fuck this”
Yeah, then sadly, they missed the boat on web 3.0 which is decentralized, resilient, static, and doesn’t require blockchain.
Out of curiosity, I have always thought text only web pages would have been way more accessible at the time were RSS was still a thing, then the blinking ad ridden pages you get nowadays.
You tell me that wasn’t a thing?
a) RSS is still a thing, I use it every day.
b) This author talks about a different kind of webpages that are “weird and quirky”. This is not exactly text only:
edit:
c) Ads are easily blocked. “Design” is much harder to fix. I rarely ever see anything blinking on modern pages, but I also use uBlock Origin everywhere, and uMatrix on desktop.
deleted by creator
Living somewhere now where many of the local websites are terribly dated and while the initial nostalgia factor was nice the lack of functionality/accessibility is seriously a problem. Not to say you can’t make a functional/accesible site with old web standards, but some things changed for a reason.
…said no one ever.
Not literally, word for word, no. Sorry if that wasn’t clear. But getting attacked over complaining about stuff like that? Happened to me, especially HackerNews is a big fan of unusable websites.
“hacker” “news” is a big fan of anything that inflicts pain and misery to anyone that’s not exactly like them (men working in high paying vc funded tech startups that will inevitably go out of business or sell out to some giant and cash out a big fat check)