Today I enjoyed reading Don't F*ck With Scroll, a particular but cromulent criticism of a trend on the web that drives me nuts: taking scroll away from the reader. Let me scroll! Normally!
"Momentum scrolling plugins (example here), while marketed as enhancements, are a plague upon the internet," writes the anonymous author, offering 10 reasons to not do that sort of thing. "They disrupt the natural, efficient, and predictable web browsing experience in countless ways, by they often degrading usability, accessibility, and performance."
It's from the creator of the web-minimalist classic This is a motherf*cking website, whose its influence can be seen in the many imitators and improvements it endures.
Minimalism is good, though one must take care to distinguish the superficial aesthetic from the real thing. Did you know many news sites (CNN, NPR, CBC) have plain text homepages? 68K news is Google News in basic HTML. Txtify extracts plain text from articles.
There is the minimalism of constraint and then there is the minimalism of wealth that need not show itself. There's the minimalism of having gotten it right the first time—Craigslist! And now there's minimal aggregators of minimal sites, such as Dead Simple Sites and Brutalist Websites.
There's an emergent genre of minimalist shopping sites, too, such as Diskprices and List of Deals. There's minimal product recommendations at Just Buy The Toaster.
Minimalism can be measured: the 1MB Club curates sites less than 1MB in size, the 512KB club halves the allowance, the No CSS club has sites with no stylesheets whatsoever, and the No JS Club abandons Javascript. (I'm thinking of starting the "No HTML club" which allows everything except hypertext)
As it stands, though, my main contribution to the genre is txt.fyi, "the dumbest publishing platform on the web." Much more practical and only slightly less minimal are Bear Blog and Tilde Club. I searched something is a minimalist work of art about how maximal the web has become.
Of course, if you don't like seeing that here at Boing Boing, you can now pay to remove the ads.
