The modern web

Doom wads

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Now, the first thing you may notice off this site is... how odd it looks! And I'd like to say, that's the whole point.  And this isn't because of my internet or lack of good hardware, it's actually by choice. I simply have a distaste of modern website design, this website is rather, minimalistic instead of outdated. It chooses not to indulge in modern web design and instead goes for a more brutalist function, it doesn't waste resource on looks bar the black background and green text with a relevant image.  You get the function of it, you like what you like (hopefully) and haven't consumed too much system resources, no need for me to have a menu system either, you either use the one on the home page or you use the ones built into your web browser, this design not only helps me, but it helps you too! Simple efficient and most of all minimal, now in web design that word is completely bastardized! 

Let me explain; modern sites pretend to be minimalistic they use a soft font a minium display of utility and pretend to present minimalism, it looks touchable you'll often have to scroll down unless you want to look at the slogan of whatever brand is present before you can get any information or utility. But these websites hide function as a result, you can't get to specific pages without something breaking because the website looked more to aesthetics than utility, to maintain the false minimalism it will hide options and pages under vague settings, so you have to fight a pretentious touch screen designed website trying to e.g. apply for a driving licence, or a firearm licence on the government website only to get confused and read the exact words the blob tells you to click on instead of a simple menu you see on my site the website looks nice sure, but you're fighting a user hostile environment that aids no one, it, simple frustrates the user and makes you instead in those examples opt to send a letter which defeats the whole point of having such services on the website we've somehow returned to a state that sends us back pre-2000 that's how bad these designs are! DOn't get me started on the lack of functionality on these sites!

While these websites pretend to minimal they are all but that, they are slower, unreliable informative. My website looks less minimal because of the text on it, sure, but the actual code used on an error page on a modern website most likely contains more code and resource hogging than the entirety of my website.  Fun fact, dial up, you know that old form of internet? Wasn't always as slow, its website bloat that made it obsolete, same with hardware. If websites were like they were back in the day, dial up would load up just fine and function more than it does now, dial up can't even load a home page let alone the modern requirements in this day and age. Hardware too struggles with this design too.  Do we need to keep upgrading our hardware and networking devices just to check the news? Just to watch YouTube and chat? Not only is this bad for the environment, but it only contributes to the wider problem in society of over stimulation and stress in the modern world. Can we please make our code minimal, too? My website isn't ideally coded, in fact the most I do in code is set the background colour, other than that I just the HTML editor on my server.  I don't think everything should be like this site, but can we at least look to 2010 for design again and make it functional again? I want utility, not pretentiousness. Too rich for my blood? No, too rich for my network!

And to counter the other side of the argument no I hate to the people who in the Linux community regard anything as much as a panel 'bloat'  in all honesty having to code a script into a panel that doesn't work or give any leeway is far more bloat than a simple plugin for an XFCE4 panel.  We, like in all things, need a moderate approach.

Over all, I just hope we can get past this era of minimalism and go back to some form of utility. Actual minimalism is lovely, it helps stress, it helps everything, from the littlest of cable management to a Zen design in our rooms stand over websites that pretend to be Zen but are simply as Zen as an episode of the Jeremy Kyle show.

Thank you for listening to my ramble here, if you'd like to talk about what I said, contact me at;
mauzki@mauzki.co.uk