Johann   tag: web development

Remember the idea that the user agent decides how to render a page? Accessibility is important, but it's not all: we already settled with and got used to making and consuming websites aimed at manipulating the user, either in a friendly, fun way, or in more sinister ways.

If the textures and fonts, the shape and colors of buttons (or "calls to action", as people who enjoy making me puke in my mouth a little call it) are really that essential to "the experience", what does that say about what people are actually writing?

I am not a writer, not even a bad one; but take the collection of quotes I keep accumulating: you may find them wise or tacky, but at any rate, it doesn't fucking matter what the colors or fonts are, as long as it's somewhat readable. Yet we are now in an age where a person can conceivably utter a phrase like "compelling use of fonts" and not even blush.

Why do websites seem to be evolving not like sneakers or buildings or toothbrushes (= usable, recognizable, but wildly varying in design), but more like an AK-47? Because "cheap and fast to produce, high rate of conversions" is all there is to making a website? Then why not skip to injecting ad-bots that assemble themselves out of waste directly in the brain?

How did the web invented by universities to exchange information and used by people to communicate turn this hellhole of pamphlets and parrots, and so fast? How the fuck is Twitter an actual thing, and not a joke in an advanced society about how primitive lifeforms might use computing machines? Not that I mean to pick on Twitter, I was just grabbing a random thing out of this bag of bullshit.

The desire to keep everything around forever, untouched, seems to be an inability to organize and distill; or at least an unwillingness try and find out it's possible. The web as an endless roll of toilet paper rather than a library is a really sad development.