One of the things I like from the (g)olden days of the web is how navigation links always had text. They could be accompanied with images or icons (like it is on this website) but the text would definitely be there, often below the icons and sometimes beside them.
Nowadays, more and more websites are moving towards replacing the text links with icons. And some of these icons are so simple and abstract that sometimes it is hard to tell what they even mean! For example, the default GMail web interface once had simple text buttons with options like "Archive", "Report Spam", "Delete", etc. Now it has tiny icons instead. While the bin icon is probably obvious to everyone (if not, it means "Delete"), there is an icon with a tiny down arrow in a tiny box that I would normally guess means "Download" but turns out it is "Archive" instead. There is another icon with a tiny right arrow in a tiny box. I would normally guess that means "Forward" but turns out it is "Move to". (Move to what? Move to a label!)
GitHub too recently adopted this trend. It had very clear and obvious text navigation links earlier. Now we find little icons instead. One of them is an irregular but symmetrical hexagon with three line segments within it. Can you guess what it is? Turns out it is a badly drawn envelope that means "Notifications". There is another one with a little dot in a circle. Until I hovered over it to read its tooltip, I had no idea that it means "Issues"!
You think it's bad; try working a phone support role where part of the job is helping people navigate around on your company's website. Sure, some of us get accustomed to the "hamburger" and "kebab" menus, but those are far from universally recognized terms.
I blame Steve Jobs. "It's intuitive!" my foot.
Even the idea that it's for screen economy on mobile devices doesn't make sense, because if these things are links, they either bring you somewhere else, or they expand something on your screen, presumably, over other content, or displacing other content. NO reason not to just have text that says "Menu" or "Settings."
It's funny you say that, because this specific site has images as the only children to the anchor HTML elements. Which renders the text mostly useless from an a11y point of view.
<font size="2">
<a href="dmg_base.htm">
<img src="dmgbase.gif" border="0">
</a>
<br>
Game Boy
</font>
> Nowadays, more and more websites are moving towards replacing the text links with icons. And some of these icons are so simple and abstract that sometimes it is hard to tell what they even mean!
Indeed. Not just websites, either. A similar trend has taken hold in applications, and it's awful.
One thing that struck me immediately is that while I remember the blinking GiFs as terribly annoying they seem tame compared to todays web without an ad-blocker.
I love it. Note that despite a good attempt to use the aesthetic of the time, some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout (I was in there in the late 90s and we used all the screen because the resolution on a 15" monitor -if you were lucky- wasn't that great).
Modern sensibilities like narrow layouts are I feel like a massive downgrade compared to full-width (or almost full-width) layouts. If the user wants less text, they can just resize the browser window, it's simple. But with those layouts, the text takes up way more vertical space than what's needed, even if you have a large screen, leading to lots of scrolling.
HN has a good layout - there are some (quite small) margins but it otherwise uses most of your screen. More websites should follow this pattern, IMO.
> some modern sensibilities are still there like the narrow layout
I prefer that be left to me to size the column for my reading preference, by setting browser size accordingly, though I appreciate a great many users browse full-screen at all times and designers need to account for that lest they be blamed for the users choices.
We need more toys so sometimes instead of posting a drawing or an essay, I build little toy websites, e.g. https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io or the footer on days.sonnet.io
The traffic might be low for some/most of them, but then the interactions with people who found me through them are so much more interesting and meaningful
> Nowadays most websites are cut from a template which is as boring as design can get.
We need to be efficient, please. Who cares if everyone is using it. Faster we tick all the boxes, the better. So we can get a new sheet of unticked todo list. /s.
I miss the “Under Construction” banners. It was ok to tell your visitors your site was a work in progress! (Also you generally had to publish and debug live.)
Lately I've run across a few of these--perhaps through HN--and I couldn't help but feel that they all exaggerated the "feel" of a 90s website, more of a caricature of our stereotypes of the era than a recreation of what an actual indication of what most actual personal pages looked like (the non-blank ones anyway).
If anything, a lot of these sites are more readable and toned down than many of that era, considering they’re not using a blue bubble pattern background with bright red Comic Sans text and spinning gifs everywhere. It taps into the nostalgia but of course it’s never going to feel exactly the same.
I'll admit I'm not totally sure what this is? Satire? Art project?
It looks to me like what would happen if you tried to verbally describe some kind of fan-based web site from 1996 to someone else who hadn't experienced the web pre-Web 2.0, and then they went off and did their best with it.
I will say, I did enjoy the web a lot more back when it felt more like a carnival than a shopping mall.
[+] [-] susam|2 years ago|reply
Nowadays, more and more websites are moving towards replacing the text links with icons. And some of these icons are so simple and abstract that sometimes it is hard to tell what they even mean! For example, the default GMail web interface once had simple text buttons with options like "Archive", "Report Spam", "Delete", etc. Now it has tiny icons instead. While the bin icon is probably obvious to everyone (if not, it means "Delete"), there is an icon with a tiny down arrow in a tiny box that I would normally guess means "Download" but turns out it is "Archive" instead. There is another icon with a tiny right arrow in a tiny box. I would normally guess that means "Forward" but turns out it is "Move to". (Move to what? Move to a label!)
GitHub too recently adopted this trend. It had very clear and obvious text navigation links earlier. Now we find little icons instead. One of them is an irregular but symmetrical hexagon with three line segments within it. Can you guess what it is? Turns out it is a badly drawn envelope that means "Notifications". There is another one with a little dot in a circle. Until I hovered over it to read its tooltip, I had no idea that it means "Issues"!
[+] [-] cykros|2 years ago|reply
I blame Steve Jobs. "It's intuitive!" my foot.
Even the idea that it's for screen economy on mobile devices doesn't make sense, because if these things are links, they either bring you somewhere else, or they expand something on your screen, presumably, over other content, or displacing other content. NO reason not to just have text that says "Menu" or "Settings."
[+] [-] Jondar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
Indeed. Not just websites, either. A similar trend has taken hold in applications, and it's awful.
[+] [-] timcederman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megalottachoc|2 years ago|reply
I'd happily trade the video ads of today for the HTML <blink> tag of old without any hesitation.
[+] [-] reidrac|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pannoniae|2 years ago|reply
HN has a good layout - there are some (quite small) margins but it otherwise uses most of your screen. More websites should follow this pattern, IMO.
[+] [-] dspillett|2 years ago|reply
I prefer that be left to me to size the column for my reading preference, by setting browser size accordingly, though I appreciate a great many users browse full-screen at all times and designers need to account for that lest they be blamed for the users choices.
[+] [-] JohnFen|2 years ago|reply
Yes, this is also horrible.
[+] [-] notorandit|2 years ago|reply
So it is not worth wasting your 28.8 modem power for it.
[+] [-] baal80spam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpastuszak|2 years ago|reply
The traffic might be low for some/most of them, but then the interactions with people who found me through them are so much more interesting and meaningful
[+] [-] bayindirh|2 years ago|reply
We need to be efficient, please. Who cares if everyone is using it. Faster we tick all the boxes, the better. So we can get a new sheet of unticked todo list. /s.
[+] [-] mrobins|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnycomputer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floppydiskette|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bityard|2 years ago|reply
It looks to me like what would happen if you tried to verbally describe some kind of fan-based web site from 1996 to someone else who hadn't experienced the web pre-Web 2.0, and then they went off and did their best with it.
I will say, I did enjoy the web a lot more back when it felt more like a carnival than a shopping mall.
[+] [-] Nux|2 years ago|reply
PS: https doesn't work on Dillo for this web site, but thanks for not enforcing a http->https redirect!
[+] [-] dannyphantom|2 years ago|reply
I have had this saved as a bookmark for a few years now: https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
There is just so much there that it's fun to come back to every now and then to poke around and see what you find.
[+] [-] thomond|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endemic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] recursive|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shanghaikid|2 years ago|reply