Subject:
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Re: Typefaces: Verdana vs. Times
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Mon, 19 Apr 1999 07:08:03 GMT
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Viewed:
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1090 times
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In lugnet.publish, rueger@io.com (Tim Rueger) writes:
> Websites that intentionally exclude the largest possible audience will
> lose in the marketplace.
I disagree. First, whether or not a website loses in the marketplace has
little to do with whether the exclusion of the largest possible audience was
intentional or unintentional, right? :)
Second, for the largest possible audience, you would probably have to use
HTML 1.0 or 2.0 or design specifically for cross-compatibility with very old
versions of NN, MSIE, and Lynx. Taken to an extreme (for instance, making
web pages that look like they are living in a 1994 time warp) backwards
compatibility can actually have a reverse effect and exclude more people
than it includes, simply because the pages look too boring.
Third, with regard to losing in the marketplace, what definition of winning
and losing do you mean? Is a really sucky website requiring tons of plugins
but turning a hefty profit a loser in the marketplace? Few websites are
phenomenally profitable today, but as more and more applications are brought
online to the web (with or without HTML), there are going to be more and
more success stories (and more failure stories).
> eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo seem to do just fine
> with plain old HTML, why shouldn't anyone else?
Because eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo! *want* and *need* the largest possible
audiences -- they're very rare sites with content that appeals to everyone:
buying & selling stuff, buying books, and getting information.
For 99.99% of the rest of the websites in the world, you don't -want- the
largest possible audience... Never, ever. Instead, you want to maximize
the area under a completely different curve. You want the best quality
visitors -- people who will actually appreciate and use your content and
make return visits -- and hopefully spend money -- and not simply the most
visitors (i.e., the largest possible audience).
> > > Sure, tags enable new features without breaking older browsers, but
> > > you know most designers don't give a whit about older browsers.
> >
> > Unfortunately, they're not often paid to. They're typically designing
> > under tight deadlines and limited budgets for particular target market
> > segments.
>
> The designer had better be serious about those "target market segments",
> because he won't be reaching anyone else.
Sometimes they (on purpose) don't want to reach anyone else.
> Besides, if time to market is so critical, why alienate part of your
> potential audience by incorporating new features?
The theory goes that new features improve the experience for the audience
that they -are- targeting. So it's worth it for them to alienate others
outside of that audience.
Of course, it's very easy to misjudge the markets and to misjudge how poorly
new technologies propagate, so decisions like that are risky.
> Designers risk
> shooting themselves in the foot by excluding those who don't choose to
> buy into some *other* marketer's latest whiz-bang feature set.
No they don't. They'll get paid regardless of how things go down the line,
and the more whiz-bang stuff they can put on their resumes, the better
chance they stand competing with others in their field.
It's not the designers who risk shooting themselves in the foot; it's the
people hiring them and specifying the parameters of the design -- the people
who own the website. The guy who -allows- garbagey new whiz-bang features
into the spec is the bad guy, not the designer who gets paid to put them in.
(Unless the designer is being paid to weigh these risks.)
> I much prefer something like XML-RPC (an emerging, open standard) to
> anything hard-wired into a particular browser or plugin (like Shockwave
> or the above mentioned site user-interface customization features).
I agree with that. XML rules. Java is pretty OK, but still has a long way
to go. Browser plugins and *anything* having anything to do with MSIE or
Active-X make are all evil. (Except certain browser plug-ins... VRML is
OK, and it was once long ago a plug-in. So was PNG, I think.)
> However, I don't think any such "technologies" will have the same impact
> plain old HTML has had and will continue to have.
That's right -- they'll have very different impacts. They'll bring in brand
new sections of the human population who weren't attracted to the Internet
before (because it was too text-oriented). The impact of these new
technologies may be greater (in scope) than HTML, or it may be lesser.
> In the long term,
> users will end up deciding what is really widely adopted.
Let's hope so. World doesn't need more MS's telling them what they should
adopt. I subscribe to the belief and hope that Linux will in 2001 or 2002
crush NT and flush MS down the toilet by 2007.
> Is anyone using PointCast anymore? Is Shockwave ubiquitous?
I think as time goes on, there will be more and more new technologies that
succeed, and even more that fail. Most will have short lifespans, but let's
not forget that even short-lived technologies can be profitable to companies
in the short-term. This isn't to suggest that they're good because of that,
but simply to point out that people will always have ulterior motives to
hype and push new technology formats, regardless of their worth. The fact
that PointCast and Shockwave "failed" doesn't mean that there will be fewer
of these in the future (10-20 years). Besides, you can't tell ahead of time
whether something is going to succeed or fail. Active-X is a success in
the marketplace, right? (Ahem.) Should it be? (Ahem.)
> I just don't see HTML going away as the lingua franca for web content.
Me neither. Sites will always have an HTML core, and some will build up
around that with other stuff. And some will stay purely HTML, if they can.
> Web usage is exploding with present interfaces (i.e., HTML 3.2 browsers
> and 28.8 modems), so they will remain the standard to which websites
> should be designed if they are to reach the widest possible audience.
>
> If a someone wants to destabilize his website with the latest gizmos,
> fine, but his audience would much more appreciate his spending the same
> time developing better actual content.
Doesn't that depend on who the audience is and the nature of the content?
> This benefits the designer more in the long run, anyway.
It depends on what the designer is after. Designers who can work with all
the latest gizmos will earn higher hourly rates than those who cannot. If
they design a lot of popular sites, they can write popular books about how
to create popular sites. If the site turns out to be unusable, they can
blame it on someone else. Or by the time the next potential client sees
their portfolio, the website they designed may have been reworked, leaving
only lifeless color screenshots to judge by. So if they're after money and
fame and glitz, then putting in gizmos probably benefits them more, if they
know how to work the scene. If they're after praise and recommendations
from management who've talked to actual happy users of the sites after the
fact, then they're probably hurting themselves in the long run. But
management who'll actually listen to users/customers wouldn't be stupid
enough to allow garbagey gizmos into the site in the first place. :)
But overall, I dunno, man -- I agree with everything you've said, in spirit.
And I agree with all of it from a system architect's point of view. But I
think the pure design world (typified by design firms and their clients)
works under a very strange sort of system which doesn't really make sense in
terms of what's best for websites. Designers are too often several steps
removed from the inner circles of the site (its leaders, its visionaries,
and, most importantly, its customers) and since they're typically on
contract, they don't usually get the opportunity to stick around and do
follow-up maintenance and return usability studies. The best thing is when
the designers and everyone else creating the site can work together in the
same building and learn from each other -- cross training -- and act as
checks & balances to each other. A programmer wants a really slick fast
simple page. A designer want something that looks beautiful. Someone has
to mediate and decide which compromises are best for the customers/visitors.
--Todd
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Typefaces: Verdana vs. Times
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| (...) Websites that intentionally exclude the largest possible audience will lose in the marketplace. eBay, Amazon, and Yahoo seem to do just fine with plain old HTML, why shouldn't anyone else? (...) The designer had better be serious about those (...) (25 years ago, 19-Apr-99, to lugnet.publish)
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