Website spring clean

This is the 800th article on this website. This is the website's twelfth year.

Modest numbers. Many blog sites have been going much longer than this and/or have amassed many more posts.

Figures of Speech came into existence sometime before it went public. It was conceived as an experiment in website engineering and as a proof of concept for some ideas of mine related to semantic processing.

Once the website was more or less the way I had imagined it, it cried out for some content, so here we are, twelve years later with 800 dollops of something or other. At the beginning I was scratching around trying to find something to write about; 800 somethings later, nothing has changed.

Spring cleaning

In the course of the last twelve years, websites have changed dramatically. During the first twenty years of the web, between, say, 1990 and 2010, technical progress brought us flat-screen monitors, large amounts of memory and ever faster processors. The monitors got larger as time went on.

Advances in hardware were paralleled by advances in software and in net connectivity, all of which meant that websites could do much more than ever: larger images, audio and video players, commenting systems and so on. The talk was of 'web 2.0'.

By the end of the period, websites spread themselves out over larger monitors; web designers often went berserk, creating complex, multi-column layouts that violated all ergonomic principles and with which the human minds of visitors could hardly cope. The talk was of 'screen real-estate'.

During the last decade of this period, mobile telephony took off. Personal phones were clunky and limited to telephone calls, then they became smaller and smaller until some idiots invented smartphones – and now we are where we are. From 2010 onwards, the smartphone has been king.

As smartphones increasingly became the device of choice for accessing the web, designers had to row back from their massive layouts requiring large flatscreen monitors and design in a way that made websites viewable on small, handheld devices such as phones and tablets.

Since it was very difficult – impossible, in fact – to make big, complex websites work on small screens, the talk was of 'mobile-first design': a webpage should work perfectly within the limits of mobile touchscreens; the design should then adapt when visitors were viewing using large monitors. Which is fine, except that on large monitors now too many websites stretch essentially trivial elements over large amounts of screen. Once again, the ergonomic principles of web design are completely ignored.

In developing Figures of Speech I stood aside from both of these trends, the inflationary and the deflationary. Based on the ergonomics of web viewing, Figures of Speech had and has a fixed width of 708 pixels (one day I shall tell you where the '8' comes from). Modern tablets and desktops have screens between 768 and 1440+ pixels, meaning that the FoS website will display correctly in its native size on all such devices.

The ergonomic aspects of web design aim to optimise readability by considering line length, font style and size, line spacing and the many other factors that need to be in harmony. If done well, the reader will not notice anything; if done badly or ignored, the reader will notice soon enough.

Smartphones, however, typically have screens between 320 and 480 pixels in width. Viewing text on such machines is not a big problem – unless the web designer has done something really stupid, most run-on text will somehow wrap within the width available. Readability is another matter. Inherently complicated layouts such as tables will do what they can do. The problem comes with images, which may or not scale correctly and which may or may not be mangled by the scaling process. The issues are technically too complex to discuss here.

What to do? Well, since FoS already displays correctly on a large number of devices, we can try and do what we can to help mobile phone users get at least something from the website.

The menus used for each year-listing and in the category lists have been improved. Even on small devices users should now be able to navigate easily. The menu entries squeeze and expand to fill the space available; the thumbnails can shrink alarmingly, but detail is not required of them anyway. Links are generously sized for the sausage-fingered amongst us.

On article pages, images and media players will do their best to scale properly. If the layout of a page is suboptimal or something has gone seriously wrong, please let me know in the comments.

So, from now on we just have to see how many somethings I come up with.