Sure. Lots of websites have really questionable javascript behavior, like replicating mobile behavior where dragging the mouse around makes you "swipe" between articles, or in-line image resizing (wikipedia), or auto-rotating image galleries, or shitty page-loading effects like fading text in, or breaking your scrollbar.
NoScript eliminates that kind of garbage.
In addition to this, there's the privacy benefits, lowering your page load time and CPU usage, and avoiding running arbitrary programs on your computer loaded off the internet, which is how GitHub was DDOSed last month.
For an average, non-technical user, I wouldn't recommend NoScript. But if you're willing to put up with a little annoyance of allowing two or three domains now and then, it really makes a lot of webpages behave better.
NoScript also has surrogate scripts that replace what was blocked with a minimal script to un-break sites. It's usually used to fool a site with first-party scripts enabled into thinking that the third-party scripts loaded, too, but there are also scripts that allow a site to work without any of its scripts being enabled. The changelog currently show that they recently added a surrogate to allow some troublesome wordpress themes to work without scripting, and to allow the Microsoft support site to show article content without scripting.
AFAIK most people use Noscript for privacy/security reasons, there's no way it makes the web more usable considering how prevalent javascript is these days.
I've yet to find a Chrome plugin that does what Toggle Animated GIFs does for Firefox.
Anybody know of one?
I'm 100% in favor of breaking up a wall of text with images, but too many bloggers favor distracting animated ones. In my perfect world, they'd be a still frame with a play button, like any other embedded video.
Exactly my thought when I saw the line "to produce beautiful display text" with an example that would have been atrocious on any GeoCities page.
OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)
I taught myself coding HTML by hand using Hippie. I regressed and switched to Frontpage because it was so "easy". I then went over to the Dreamweaver and stayed there until I learned server-side programming, which put me back in the text editor, where I've happily been since.
Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.
Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.
"When making headers or display texts on your website, you'll often want to stylize your text in a decorative way."
Oh dear.
"..with minimal effort to produce beautiful display text"
The original fonts are tweaked painstakingly by a designer. The "effects" are like putting lipstick on Mona Lisa.
Web site design is now a branch of publishing and design and Google is one of the larger corps operating in the area. This is like... I don't know, offering a high end DSLR with a physical button to add instagram filters and lens flare to the original image. Well, for free, but the decision process to add these features gives the appearance of amateurism and lack of respect for good design.
Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
> Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
Plenty of money in that demographic; when Google can track schoolkids habits they can predict their future habits as adults and be the first to sell the best ads. Google (and Target) knows about the first pregnancy before the mother.
As always we're oscillating. I too am thinking the older wilder web had something that has been lost nowadays. Everything is very similar even if cuter and more interactive. There were a lot of curious 'design' and aesthetics before.
They can't possibly have been around that long - according to all the other very original comments here, the web would have imploded and turned into 1995 geocities or some such.
nostalgia ...
It amazes me to think that back then how we all collectively agreed that those spinning, scrolling, blinking geocities type designs were cool - and tried to imitate them. Now a decade later, collectively laugh at them. This seems common in fashion - but is it true for other art forms as well? How then some art survive the through time and are viewed as beautiful by number of generations that follow? I mean, could we point to some web designs done years back that would still appear tasteful and clever today?
The reason the early public WWW is so ridiculous is that it was an entirely new technology and thus we embraced its difference. The closest equivalent to a webpage was a physical printed page and the most obvious thing a webpage can do that printed pages can't is having animations.
It's also easy to forget that while some works of art have endured over thousands or tens of thousands of years, most art likely hasn't. The ancient art we have today is like a Best Of album -- it leaves out all the works that were instantly forgotten or just not good enough and creates the impression that everything was better back then.
One bad thing about using computer in China is, anything Google-related either is painfully slow or deliberately blocked (by GFW). On some website, google-analytics.com become a major speed reducer (browser says something like "sending data to google-analytics.com"). Using fonts.googleapis.com have a similar effect.
Chinese people would have to wait until some Chinese company make similar things available.
Or you just get screwed if you are in China using the western web without a VPN. I find that about 20-30% of the sites actually work, not because they are explicitly blocked by the GFW, because they are using some Google API/font/analytics.
Thankfully, reddit and hackernews are good, and they have pretty much become the web for me while I'm at home (we have a direct connection at work).
We need a new an HTML5 what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor (a new Frontpage/Dreamweaver). Sadly, the HTML "contentEditable" API is in a very broken state.
Same here - I thought some of the effects were just very subtle, until I opened the link in Chrome! Oh well, most of our client traffic is not Firefox so this isn't such a huge issue.
I would say that this is almost more of a "developer design link" than a "designer design link". As in an engineer/dev can implement these "effects", in code without touching graphic editing software.
Looks like Google discovered that they can keep tracking this way users on remaining websites that don't use google analytics. And this time if you start blocking these requests the web page will look bad.
Extensions required to make the web usable:
AdBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/
NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/
Toggle Animated GIFs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animat...