On Dec 11, 2011 10:03 PM, "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
While the design and user interface of Wikipedia certainly has things
that could stand improvement, I generally like the fact that it's not
run by a "billion dollar budget" commercial outfit brimming with
meddlesome marketing and management types and artsy graphical
designers, aimed at producing a site design that looks cool when
demoed in PowerPoint presentations, shoves lots of annoying,
intrusive ads at the user and is explicitly designed and structured
to maximize this even at the expense of actual content, and works
well (if at all) only in the particular browsers and platforms
targeted by the developer.
Those sites are hard to navigate, hard to read, slow to load, prone
to crashing your browser, go out of their way to interfere with
normal browser operations like caching and back/forward buttons by
having crazy contraptions of scripts to reinvent those wheels in an
inferior way, and are generally a headache to use in comparison with
Wikipedia.
This. A hundred times, this.
Compare Quora and Wikipedia: I have reached the unenviable situation of
having the rich-text editor lag while typing on my laptop (with 2Gb RAM and
a 2.2GHz dual core CPU).
It is 2011: beyond "flashiness", I have no idea why a webapp performs worse
than the first version of Word I used back on my 386. But at least the user
experience doesn't scare people by introducing the minimal costs of
actually having to use one's brain, right?