• tunetardis@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    I imagine you’re probably talking more about content, but you’ve uncovered a pet peeve of mine having more to do with the structure of web pages.

    The original vision of html was to have this beautiful format that flows text and graphics elegantly over whatever space you give it. I remember thinking this is great! One day we will have pocket-sized displays and the web is already future-proofed to work seamlessly in that world.

    Then fast-forward to smart phones. By now, web pages were so rigidly formatted that they had to design special mobile versions of every site.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      8 months ago

      well, at its heart, the ‘www’ was supposed to be a bunch of documents linked to each other contextually… in a similar vein Wikipedia handles things

      you ever try and use the web without images? genX remembers.

      • DandomRude@lemmy.worldOP
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        8 months ago

        I think that’s too generalized. Marketing finances the Internet just as it has always financed print media (including the good, even inversitgative journalism).

        • SexyVetra@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I think that’s too generalized. Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years before marketing finance.

          Touch some grass.

          • Neato@ttrpg.network
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            8 months ago

            Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years

            Uh, no? If by media you mean anything that could remotely considered for the masses then absolutely not. The printing press was so revolutionary because it allowed making multiple copies of written documents without doing them each manually. Reading and writing was so expensive and rare a hobby because the written word was expensive; why would you need to read more than the basic signs if chalk boards were your limit of writing?

            “News” before then was word of mouth. Town criers and the like.

            • SexyVetra@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              My neato.

              Guy replies with a hyperbolic shitpost about capitalism.

              OP replies sincerely.

              I reply hyperbolically in turn.

              You assume I’m serious, then assume media can only mean “the mass news media” while ignoring any subtler parallels about access to information and adoption. (e.g. Does reading and writing being expensive relate to the early internet where access and hosting were expensive? Does the evolution of the written word have parallels with the evolution of the internet?)

              If I’m responding semi-seriously, I do want to note that it’s only in the American school system where there’s no writing until the west gets paper. Armies of scribes carved into stone, impressed into clay, and wrote onto vellum to blanket empires in written news.

    • DandomRude@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 months ago

      Yes, I’m mainly concerned with the content. HTML certainly gives you all the possibilities, but it has ultimately led to boring but easy-to-use and correspondingly restictive UIs. I think anyone who wants to reach a lot of people today will do so via social media (original Myspace unfortunately didn’t work out, tho).