Are Websites Poorlier Designed than used to be?

[Lord Osmund de Ixabert]

Websites today are much poorlier designed than they used to be, in my view.

In the incipient stages of Internet, the exiguous bandwidth of Internet connexions mandated a paramount emphasis on cybernetwork optimisation & parsimony, with the aim of guaranteeing that capacious & intricate websites would be neither impracticable to access nor vexaciously slow to retrieve. Additional exiguity of computational power necessitated an emphasis on minimalistic web design, lest the meagre system resources be overburthened by cumbersome graphics or animation. Alas, we now face the oppposite predicament.

One of the greatest limitations encountered by web architects & software engineers during this æra was the constraint of limited Random Access Memory (RAM). The relative paucity of memory necessitated that web pages, & computer software programs in general, be crafted with an eye towards economy. (If modern, large, memory-intensive websites like the ones we have today were loaded into the web browsers of early Internet, even the most advanced computers of the time would have been rendered vulnerable to processor incapacitation, memory derelictions, programmatic interruptions, system failures, software abortions, data loss events, processor halts, operating system implosions, application overloads, frying of the motherboard, code corruption, memory overloads, & physical damage to the central processing unit.)

To ameliorate this, designers & developers concentrated on constructing streamlined, optimised code, which resulted in more rapid website retrieval times & increased responsitivity.

The relatively minimalistic, hence æsthetically superior, design philosophy, which was ubiquitous during the early days of Internet, was a direct consequence of the connectivity & processing limitations of that æra, & the constraint of limited RAM, specif., necessitated a focus on efficient code & streamlined design, thereby yielding a more efficacious & user-friendly cybernetic experience.​

 

[Charles Silvius Haddock]

Yes, bringing back a sort of Web 1.0 aesthetic has a lot to recommend it. One of the troubles here is that even as soon as Web 2.0 matured, to say nothing of the terminal phase now (Web 2.5 as we call it), high traffic sites began to incorporate tracking and advertising code to the point that it was already ubiquitous nigh on 10 years ago. By the mid-2010s it was nearly impossible to browse a mainstream site without some kind of 'net condom' (ad blockers and tracker killers, etc). As a counter-balance, we can stress for our own websites a much simpler design, perhaps just HTML/CSS/JS which eliminates another major slowing point (the database, and the need for two servers -- one for programmatic code, and one for data retrieval) -- and this slowing point is also a major point for censorship as well. This way, you can still take advantage of all of the improvements of the HTML5/CSS3 aera, yet without the bloat. You can even get effectively free hosting from cloud providers or Github, however the former will only last so long as your site has low traffic. Future web projects should be conceived with a "retro-futuristic" aesthetic as we continue to work toward the distributed samizdat Web 3.0 aera.

PS The point about hardware constraints -- mostly an afterthought these 15 years or so -- is a good one. The 2020s and beyond could easily involve hardware wars, and having the ability to operate from much lower memory and bandwidth constraints might come in handy. Moving all of that manufacturing to East Asia wasn't wise. The price tag for semiconductor and RAM facilities is in the 10s of billions, provided the US can summon the expertise to manufacture them at scale again if necessary, which, given the current cultural malaise, is almost certainly not the case.

If something like this occurred, languages optimised for 'close to chip'/low-level programming may come again into vogue, such as ANSI C or even Assembly language.

PPS Most of the software "stacks" used in industry now are ridiculously inefficient and bloated (e.g. the frameworks, the devops tools, the cloud services, the interpreted environments, etc), and they will be in for serious troubles if there's a major systemic disruption as discussed above.

 

[Lord Osmund de Ixabert]

All very good points. Widespread utilisation of portable apparatus is another contributing factor, I believe. Many online platforms seem to be tested out only on mobile devices, and/or designed solely with mobile devices in mind. Even the visual content appears to have been crafted with only the mobile audience in mind​

 

[Charles Silvius Haddock]

I didn't even open the mobile-first can of worms, but yes, this has been a major corrupting factor over about the same period. Classic web browsing of the sort we came of age with became a lesser consideration in that time. Designers and developers did take into account different categories of devices for UI/UX optimisation in that time, since most firms in the developed world still are heavy on the workstations and such, but owing to the oecumenical character of mobile devices and LTE in much of the developing world, I believe that was decisive in tipping things slightly in favour of mobile during the last decade to a large degree. That and simple convenience among the people of the developed world. And while we are on the subject, let me just tell you: When I was first working as an Android developer, the work machine at that time was a 2013 Lenovo laptop with a spinning drive. It took 30 minutes to build and run the company's application when I was debugging it. It only improved when I used a later model laptop with an SSD and much larger RAM capacity. This gives a good illustration of the sort of constraints you might face, were the situation to get much worse -- as in, "back to the 1990s" worse.

To give an idea of how bad things've gotten, there was an article in the past 3 years or so showing the objective decline of software quality. Even as hardware capabilities continued to accelerate, the performance of software mostly stayed the same or slightly degraded, which means it actually got much worse. It seems to me that all of these ailments could be solved by a "back to basics" approach, but that won't be taught in the mainstream. Minimal design and low-level programming are waiting to be rediscovered by DIY programmers.

 

[kanethenotorious]

Websites are designed to work on more devices now but that may mean people no longer emphasize web development for computers and instead focus on mobile. Obviously you have less screen to work with on mobile so the extra features that separate the two might be neglected.

 

[Buglord]

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

I read low tech magazine sometimes and it has the backend powered by a solar panel and maintains a very minimal and energy efficient webpage design to make it easier to load on multiple devices.

Based Cooking

The fast-loading recipe site with cooking only and no ads.

based.cooking

You also have this interesting cooking website which maintains a super simple recipe format without a lot of fluff and extra crap that creates overhead. (small page payloads mean the website can fit on your desktop).

I think more websites could streamline their designs and cut out the chaff. Even Wikipedia which is a primarily text based website requires a very hefty connection to handle all of the extra multimedia that has continued to infiltrate articles.