Why I am changing my website back to text

Jun 23, 2023

In the past days I re-installed my old Windows 95 desktop PC. In doing so, I realized that I can personally work much more focussed when I am reading and using simple and plain text UIs. In this post I will go into detail on these experiences and look for other sources why this feeling might not only be true for me.

Practicality in the design

What always struck me as very special about the time when Windows 9x came about was the way everything on the computer seemingly was made to be practical. Sure, the new UI of Windows 95 was a big leap back then. Just compare the improvements in user experience to older versions of Windows. But in that time there were very clear rules on how something had to look if it was to match the common UX and “feel right” in Windows 9x. Or as I, a child back then, would see it - UI rules for “something that runs on a computer”. Why do I say this?

As I reinstalled some old software on the ol’ Win95 machine, I came about Delphi 5 with Interbase 5. A hillarious combination, on which I might write another post, soon. The UI and UX of these tools is so different and unthinkable today, it’s great fun. What I like most about it, is its practicality. Not one menu to little, not one button too much. An entry in the included help file for every functionality - something that is rather hard to find today. And all is text: text on grey, text on white - but text. No emojis, dark mode or customizable fonts here. It almost feels like the 90s engineer used these tools to get a job done - just like the construction worker uses his hammer.

You wouldn’t paint your hammer green if you didn’t like the color, would you? It would remain a hammer - its the functionality you are after here.

Back then, it seems, functionality was the main thing that made the tool useful. Nevertheless, I like todays opportunities to change layouts, colors, fonts to my liking. But do I really need it to get the job done? No. This practicality, this pure focus on functionality, is what makes these things interesting to me. Sometimes it feels like you can really understand why something works the way it does - you can still see how somebody thought - “this must go here, it is logical that this happens here”.

I even would go as far as to say - the experience is “unspoiled”, original computing. Back then every Software had the same kind of menu, it had buttons, lists and tables. And content was text - and that was pretty much it.

One interesting thought I just came up with writing this: maybe the different ways we use UI - and how we get used to specific patterns of UX - is dependend on the time the Software was created, too. I mean, sure it is. Maybe using these tools and having plain text websites feels good to me, because this is what I knew as a child: this is what created my passion for Software development.

So I guess it’s save to say: having a plain website, is for me, first and foremost one thing: a cosy feel good remembrance of the olden days.

As the Stronghold Intro once said: “Ahh, life in the old castle. Happy times they were.”

Efficient use of screen-space

Another thing that fascinates me is the amount of content that could be fitted onto one screen.

In times of smartphones, where every content has to be pressed onto very little physical screen-space, there are at max a few lines of text on one “page”. To deal with this limitation, scrolling is probably the most important way of navigating on modern webpages. And because most webpages are optimized for mobile devices, real desktop reading experiences can be hard to find. If you really wan’t to read something, PDFs or e-books provide most comfort nowadays.

Case and point: just look at how much you have read on this page up until now: if you’re on a full HD screen (on PC), you can still read this sentence with having had scrolled at most once. On a typical page, you would have had to scroll multiple times already, because of the device optimization for smartphone users. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to support mobile and tablet devices for any webpage. But I think the desktop experience is something that should not be forgotten about.

Somehow the reading-experience here feels much more like reading a newspaper or a book to me than what a typical webpage feels like.

Weird can be beautiful, too

Another point that has been lost with the polished webpages is the experience of exploring the Internet. I think we’ve got used to certain looks and feels of webpages and more or less expect them all to behave in a similar way. The necessity of cookie banners doesn’t help here either. In the early 2000s up until I think the 2010s the diversity of designs, user experiences and ways different sites presented their content was in my experience much bigger: the industry standard frameworks of today (Bootstrap, Material UI etc.) were not yet as established.

How much style or CMS do I really need?

I think this is another main reason why I personally went back to plain and simple text. Let’s be honest, I don’t post that often here. You can see that quite easily, after all I just started to do some more writing last year - and removed posts of lesser quality from the past. What I want to do here is just share some thoughts and from time to time some hopefully helpful guides in Software Engineering.

And for that I will write text.

I can write this text in MD and use a site generator to publish this. This is comfortable enough. I don’t need any additional stuff most CMSs offer: user management, plugins, SEO. Really, I do this mostly for myself.

What others say

I searched the Internet for the opinions of other people on the role of text as content in the modern Internet. The most inspiring page I found is Words by Justin Jackson. His approach is much less about “nostalgia”, as it is for me with this website, but much more about content, and the power of being able to publish “words”. A great tool, which only the internet can provide in its wide accessability.

Another interesting article I found is one by Peter Matthew Wooley from 2007 called Meaningless Webdesign (couldn’t find any info on his person anywhere sadly). He goes in with a strong thesis:

Meaning is a necessity of design and nearly all Web design, at present, is meaningless.

He explains that design and meaning have to go hand in hand - just like it does in the “real world” of news-papers and movies. Which makes my point about “Weird can be beautiful” in the aspect of meaning quite wrong - but hey. Another idea he is presenting is that our attention span isn’t as short as the media might think: boring, shortened content doesn’t engage readers. Seems to me like a henn egg problem.

He goes into further detail concerning content in the web:

While less specific to the greater good, content on the Internet, especially textual content, can easily be called “Anorexic” and in need of revival. With slow Internet connections, inpatient users, and no one defending compelling copy, Web writing has withered away and has all but died. The fault can be squarely place on we, the designers, and it is the designer’s responsibility to breath life back into our faithful companion—text.

Looking at this quote in current times I would add: the consitent conditioning for shorter and shorter content (like it is done on platforms like TikTok) might have given us an even harder road back to rich text-content on the web today. I would present the thesis: We have forgotten to enjoy complex texts and posts in favor of short and rewarding media (like short videos with possibility of user interaction). Luckily there are some smaller “islands of hope” in the wide web, for example Hackernews, which provides complex and interesting texts to read. And of cause there is always a good book not too far away - or a text website like this #humblebrag.