Non-functional and ugly? I'd say this is subjective, but I find this assessment objectively wrong.
It's complete accessible, and totally functional for what it does -- present a series of sections and display code examples. And it's also quite obviously well designed from an aesthetic perspective.
(There's no black box in the actual site in Chrome, but even with the black box, it's a totally fine functional design).
As for the NYT, it looks like a compromise between looking like a print newspaper of yore, a portal of slightly less yore, and a modern news website cramming everything in the same start page.
I was responding to a post about design, so this reply was about design.
Yeah, it's a subjective opinion. Something looking good is also an opinion.
What I mean by non-functional is that the attempt at design was non-functional on my browser resulting in dead space and unattractive design.
Since this book is about programming, it already sets a precedent for potentially pretty but non-universally-working solutions. Something I personally try to avoid as much as possible.
Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.
Honestly, this all wouldn't normally bother me as there are tons of books whose online sites have OK at best design. And maybe it's a great book, but complimenting it on design specifically seems wrong.
>Other issues with the design is huge unattractive margins and the main page containing almost no information when first loaded.
"Huge unattractive margins", or use of ample "negative space", has long been a staple of the design vocabulary. Nothing inherently unattractive about it.
If what you want to say fits in a small space, don't make it take over the screen, and don't try to cram every level of information on a single page.
And it's the opposite of the overly busy, migraine inducing NYT website you mentioned as a good example of web design.
Are you using Firefox? I see the same black box in Firefox too (which is actually an SVG inside an <img> tag), but in Chrome, it renders fine: https://imgur.com/a/NdvKN
It looks like the SVG's style block[0] applies a black background to the svg element:
svg {background: rgb(1.0,1.0,1.0)}
which fails to render in chrome due to the floats but renders fine in firefox. If set to white or removed entirely, it will display correctly in Firefox.
Non-functional and ugly? I'd say this is subjective, but I find this assessment objectively wrong.
It's complete accessible, and totally functional for what it does -- present a series of sections and display code examples. And it's also quite obviously well designed from an aesthetic perspective.
(There's no black box in the actual site in Chrome, but even with the black box, it's a totally fine functional design).
As for the NYT, it looks like a compromise between looking like a print newspaper of yore, a portal of slightly less yore, and a modern news website cramming everything in the same start page.