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Is it because websites are converging on what boosts search rank? Or maybe there is a consolidation in the frameworks used to build web sites? Perhaps users gravitate to using sites whose layouts are "familiar"?
Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar:
Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: "Why are all websites starting to look the same?"
These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from.
My colleagues Bardia Doosti, David Crandall, Norman Su and I were studying the history of the web when we started to notice these posts cropping up. None of the authors had done any sort of empirical study, though. It was more of a hunch they had.
We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.
[...] This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry—one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:00PM (3 children)
Honestly, the reason SoylentNews is balls on mobile is that no one has gone through to write a new CSS or HTML layout to fix it which we could load via viewport. Multi-column website design appears to be pretty much dead and gone on most of the Internet. Granted, at least SN doesn't lag.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday May 14 2020, @04:12PM (1 child)
Would you accept a PR? I feel like one of the few souls who actually understands the nuts and bolts of responsive design well enough to hack it into a legacy codebase like SN without bringing in some trendy framework. I just haven't made any PRs because whenever it comes up, it sounds like most everyone is opposed to the idea.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:26PM
We've had a long standing offer to merge any such PR. The problem is no one has managed to do so for SN because our lack of JavaScript. rehash (the underlying code) has a fairly extensive templating engine and if you want to replace all the HTML with something better fit for mobile, that's entirely possible. Drop by on IRC in #dev if you want to stare into the abyss. The most important thing to know is almost all the HTML rendering is ontop of Template::Toolkit.
We also put the abyss on github for your viewing pleasure: https://github.com/soylentnews/rehash [github.com]
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @08:09PM
Is it too much to ask mobile users to just tilt the phone to horizontal and forget about their infinite scroll addiction?