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by MatthewPhillips 5021 days ago
Blame the move toward blogging systems that separated content from presentation. Blame advertising which has to be front-and-center at all times.

I wonder how advertising would work on the web if you didn't have omni-present ads but instead sometimes the viewport contained no ads, sometimes it contains big huge ads that take up the entire viewport (like a full-page ad in a magazine). Would that make up for them not being visible at all times? Anyone tried this?
2 comments
ImprovedSilence 5021 days ago
Your idea sounds similar to some websites that show a full page banner with an x in the corner before visiting a certain page.
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sdoering 5021 days ago
Interesting thought. Never thought about it this way (and working in an environment, where it might fit).

Not trying to defend the practice of ads like they are today, but thinking twice brings one thought to my head:

Why recreate the style of an old medium in a new one. When the printing press was developed - for the first decades books just looked like before. looked like they were handwritten by scribes. Gradually books evolved into something more of their own.

So why build digital copies of magazine-layout? I really do not have a better solution - I am merely asking the question, that keeps bugging me all the time, when I think about the evolution of the web.

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MatthewPhillips 5021 days ago
> Your idea sounds similar to some websites that show a full page banner with an x in the corner before visiting a certain page.

Similar, but not the same. That's more like sticking an ad on the cover of a magazine. If you are presented with content, then have to scroll past an ad I think the experience might be better. Currently we live with sidebars that contain omni-present ads.

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codegeek 5021 days ago
which i personally absolutely hate.
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cws 5021 days ago
the separation of content and presentation has been important in web design from a code perspective. CSS exists because separating content and presentation was desirable. But most people don't want to deal with all that mess. They want to make a fun web page quickly and easily to serve whatever purpose they have in mind right then.
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MatthewPhillips 5021 days ago
I'm not talking about CSS, I'm talking about removing the content from HTML and sticking it in a database. Thus HTML is merely a template to be reused over and over. Hence boring layouts that work with all content equally well. In some situations this is critical, I'm not arguing against its existence, but we've gone too far in that direction whereas, as this article points out, there's not a lot of tailored web pages on the internet any more. Which is a shame.
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