The Internet sucks - what do you think?

mr.datsun said:

'TRONgui a mission from God' ???

I would leave God out of it. Certainly would exclude me from consulting you, if you mean it.

Looked at your site. Hard to see the implications of your design philosophy from that alone. A real-world application might break it or certainly put it to the test. I know that the purest of intentions cannot always stand up to the needs and demands of an actual client. But good luck with it.

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well the film buffs would have recognized the quote "we're on a mission from God".

Thanks for the support, we intend to keep on applying the TRONgui design philosophy to real-world applications like we have already on our own website and the WorkSpace website.
Our communities (the music one is coming back online soon), is still not 100% TRONgui, because it's basically an opensource engine that we modified, until we get to the point where we create our Tg Social Network which is in the lab right now. It's unlike anything. No menu at the top. Totally reimagined with an entirely different 'base' to build on, in terms of gui. Scary. But it's not fully developed yet as a concept, we're working on it. But already it's, shall we say "different".

Our blog is also in the works, which recently had a breakthrough in the lab. I realized what a blog ought to be, but has never been so far.
But when you make new stuff, some people are bound to hate it. It's a given.

Hey I'm glad we had this talk and thanks for the praise, I didn't think it was going to be about my company or our products directly, but of course that works out great too.

...the internet does suck though. And that is what drives us. We really think the web needs a major paint job. So we're giving it our best shot. Thanks for the support guys, you helped send it on it's way.

...and by the way ...Apple rules! That new Mothership Campus is too cool to fly.

Check out the drone flyover movie - insanely great.

ChrisA said:

We have been hearing this for years (decades really) that we have to think about the end user first

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It's easy to talk about easy. It's complicated to make something easy. Seriously.

Know why is on one your site or what he wants to do with our application. Place the most used controls in the most accessible locations

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Everyone should place their own bets. We're not going with this one. We think it's a big mistake to put what the user wants on the front page. This is in fact why websites go terribly wrong. At our website we didn't put what the users want on the front page. Instead we made it 'easy'.

So what are you doing that is new? Besides attempting to actually act on that advice.

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Depends on your developer eyes, if you can see anything new or not. It seems people in the thread has been able to spot it.

One thing I'd like to see is a web app platform that uses analytic data from real users and then dynamically moves the links and controls. It can predict what the user is looks for and place it front and center. This would vary depending on the specific user and what other users have done. The designer would only work out the logical design, not the graphical design

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Sounds interesting. We're going in the opposite direction. But stay hungry stay foolish. Innovate!

NutsNGum said:

Lol.

You sound remarkably like someone I used to work with. Completely convinced that everyone else is wrong despite ample evidence to the contrary.

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I think we have all worked with people who sees the majority as evidence.

We see ample evidence that most websites are bloated, confusing and cramped with links and options on the frontpage.
But everyone makes their own bets, and you have to make yours.
If you always surrender to conventional wisdom, what can you expect out of life except conventional results?

"Find one or two instances in your life, where the whole world is wrong, and you can make limitless fortunes"
-- Larry Ellison

Flood123 said:

Agreed.
Tables for non-tabular data? Nnnnnnnnnnnnh

Zab the Fab,
NutsNGum does bring up some good points regardless if you agree with them or not. It is my opinion as well as the opinion of countless others that tables for non-tabular data is semantically bad. However if it is your preferred method, table on my friend.

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Illogical. If we don't agree with arguments, they wouldn't be good points in our view. I have explained our logic, in the end it is not the developers who decides, but the visitors to the websites. Developers place their bets, and time will tell.

Good luck to you. It is nice to see people innovating. If this idea doesn't succeed (not saying this idea won't), the next one might.

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We also encourage innovation. Everyone should make one "crazy" project a month or something. We have found that even our bad ideas, tend to inspire us to come up with good ones.

Now for the constructive part:

Have you tested this in ANY version of internet explorer? Regardless of your opinion of windows or IE, a lot of folks choose IE as their primary browser.

In IE 9, 10, and 11 pushes your content to the right of the browser window. You have to scroll to the right to view the content. When you click on any of the nav items it snaps back to center cutting off portions of your nav and forcing you to scroll back to view the content. Your bullets are right on the border of the content box which is different from Safari and chrome.
unfortunately developing for IE is a pain. It is just something that we have to do as developers. If we don't our clients lose a heavy portion of their audience.
http://www.netmarketshare.com


Curious, do you have a mobile optimized version of this?

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Yes we are aware that IE as usual is trying to control the internet by making it's own rules. And you are absolutely right that we all have to make things work on IE ....for now.

We have not been able to figure out why (!) IE is behaving this way. The positioning code is petty staight forward. No exotic code really.
position: relative;
top: 50%;
left: 50%;
margin: -350px 0px 0px -600px;
height: 700px;
width: 1200px;

But Internet Explore just goes off on a tantrum as usual.

Someone should crowdfund a TV commercial telling people to switch away from IE. No, I'm not kidding. We should all unite in fighting the beast of the intenet. They are down from 90 +% marketshae, to a little over 50%. Just laid off 18,000 people, came in below estimates and what have they got going for them for the future?
It's all gonna be over for them pretty Zune. But we can help speed up the process.

...I see the Apple Brotherhood just released a statement on the matter (humor, beware)

Thiemo said:

Sorry but I have to say, your website sucks

A user

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Which websites do you like?
Let's see if you can find these targets:
1) TRONgui shop
2) A songwriter community (being developed)
3) Themes

ps
(currently there are some changes going on, during an 'expansion' of subpages. New version coming soon)

Flood123 said:

Zab the Fab,

Microsoft purchased Nokia's Phone Division and inherited 27,000 more employees. There was a lot of overlap. The redundant jobs were eliminated. Hence 18,000 jobs gone. Harsh reality but it was business.

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Yes I am aware. But you don't see Apple firing thousands of people when they acquire a new company. It looks more like they are trying to camouflage a legitimate layoff. But that is speculation on my part, admitted.

It has become pretty clear that no one will be able to convince you that a table layout isn't the best solution. That being said trying to fix the issue with what you have:

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I've only seen arguments like "table code is the old way of doing things". I don't see HTML code as a fasion statement. A table centers horizontally and vertically, if that's what you need, why would you let arguments like that prevent you from using it?
This is just one more area where we see things very differently, but that's ok by us. We wonder why designers don't put more focus into making things easy for the user. The user don't care if you use a table or a div. But this thread proves perfectly, in our view, how designers are focused on the wrong thing. Hence most of the websites out there has probably the latest fresh code, and are horribly confusing to use.

Everyone makes their own bets and takes their own chances. This is our bet.
In the end it's the visitors who will judge, reward or punish your site. So one bette think things through real hard.

Would taking align center off the tables and handling the css like i have posted below help? Not sure why you want to put a height on everything. Obviously the height is required in some place. Why not let the content push the containers heights. If you look at the way you CURRENTLY have it (inspecting the elements in your browsers dev tools), the body is not expanding the height of the content.

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It was a struggle to get the table to keep it's form on all pages no matter the content. If we let the content decide the size, the table will change size and position from page to page.
Some don't notice that clicking the different cells actually takes you to subpages.
But I could just use the cell sizes to control that.

#trongui-frontpage-table{
position: relative;
margin: 150px auto 0;
width: 1200px;
font-family: 'Varela Round', sans-serif;
color: rgba(100,100,100,1.0);
font-size: 20px;
border: none;
padding: none;
}
#footer{
position: relative;
width: 100%;
margin: 100px auto 50px;
text-align: center;
line-height: 30px;
font-size: 12px;
}

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Very strange. Usually margin:?px auto; does not work on Firefox. Now suddenly it does?
But the 150px top margin is less than optimal on a laptop. It should center. Positioning I guess is area where we come the closest to using 'responsive design'.

It's a mystery why IE is rebelling against normal position:relative; with a left:50%; the same trick seems to work just fine in vertical mode when we use top:50%; and of course add the margin minus.

I would love to put up a link saying "please use a modern browser" with links to Safari, Firefox and Chrome. But it conflicts with easy. Maybe I'll come up with an idea.

Hey thanks for the code suggestion. I gave up using margin: auto long time ago, since it never worked in Firefox. Perhaps they updated it.
Now I can experiment with

NutsNGum said:

Because it sucks for both accessibility and SEO, as has been explained in detail by at least one other person.

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As I have outlined a few times, we care first about the user, and second about the code.
It's this reversed priority that is the cause of the current state of websites out there.
I wouldn't mind of someone could rewrite the current site in much bette code. I only care about the user experience.

We don't write websites for Google Bots, we write them for the people who visits the sites. I know, blasphemy.

We expect the professionals will scuff at our way of thinking, but that's ok. We likewise think the entire industry ran off the cliff years ago.

So we develop different solutions. The users will vote and decide in the end.

This is just such a ridiculous thing to say, when frankly, your site has absolutely zero IE support and is a screenreader's nightmare.

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Are you confusing an IE bug, with a failed user experience? This is another mistake we often see from web designers. Confusing the issues.

We of course want the website to run on IE. Since you focus mostly on the code, perhaps you have solutions?

Surely you see the irony in this.

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No we don't see any irony in taking people to subpages, that only change one out of 4 cells.

It always has -- at least since CSS 2.0. has existed.

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Not really. But I forget if it's only Firefox on PC. But I had to give up using it, even though I was all the time, until a PC developer pointed it out to me.

You need to hire a front-end developer.

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We hope to hire many, if 'easy' is well received. Like I said, we knew the web designers would scuff at anything new that would challenge their paradigm. But in the end it's not the web designers who will decide. It's the users.

I hope you keep innovating NutsNGum. 10 bad ideas justify one really good one, cause you can throw away the bad ones. Good luck out there.

NeilHD said:

I like the idea that you are trying something new and different, but I'm not totally convinced it works. It doesn't seem that intuitive to me.

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I saw your post, but I was already in the middle of updating the site, because I was not so happy with the solution inside the 'your website' cell. It's updated now.

You don't think it's that intuitive. Well it's hard to measure on a scale, which is the most intuitive. But if you can find these targets, it's intuitive 'enough' for you to navigate the website, which is more than can be said for a lot of websites out there. This is our goal.

Targets:
1) does www.TRONgui.com offer a one-page-shopping product?

2) does TRONgui offer an investor opportunity for a new concept job market?

3) is there a community on the way for songwriters?

And it doesn't seem to render nicely in Firefox either. The listitems in each box don't align correctly and are slightly off the page to the left. I also don't understand why when I select one of your other tiles, the one I was already reading closes. What if I wanted to cross-reference between the two?

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Yes I am aware of FF glitches, thanks for the heads-up. We are busy at the moment with setting up the shop for an upcoming project, so it's waiting on our to-do-list.
Both the TRONgui and new job market cells will receive updates in the near future as well. The site is still being built, in depth.

As for IE - that is a total disaster. You may not like IE but you can't just ignore it for that reason. Your users - and your customers - will NEED IE support. As an example, I work for a fairly major ecommerce site in the UK. We get approx 1m unique visitors today. IE is the browser used by the majority of our customers, followed by Chrome, then Mobile Safari.

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The IE bug was a strange one. No one could figure it out. A simple table with position: relative;
Turns out IE likes position:absolute; a lot better. But there are more glitches, which are also on our to-do-list for later. We are too busy at the moment.

Last I checked 53% was using IE, but now there is evidence that it's somewhere between 8% to 25% only. Yes, I bare good news for the developer village.

What I really don't understand is your aversion to Responsive design. If you don't want to scale down to a phone screen then fine - have an "m." for that - but tablets will not show your page properly (disclaimer - I have not tried this on an actual tablet, but simply by resizing the desktop window), meaning the user has to keep scrolling left and right. On our site, the screen is re-arranged slightly for tablets (which is around 50% of our visitors now) to keep the site completely on-screen. And actually our conversion rate is higher on Mobile Safari than on any other platform.

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It looks and works just like the desktop, on an iPad. We agree with Apple that websites should not be designed specifically for mobile devices. But as an example we disagree with Apple's fundamental website navigation.

You don't want to program for Google bots? SEO is the lifeblood of a site. You DO want your site to be found by Google bots. Trust me.

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We believe visitors are the lifeblood of a site. It used to come only from Google. Today it comes increasingly from the people that use the internet, now that they have social tools to share what they discover.
The old paradigm has led to horrible websites for humans, which are fantastic for google bots. We want to change this.

We like to do SEO things, like tags etc. But we do not design the website around it. Instead we make it for the humans who will actually use the site first, and think of SEO second.

As I said I appreciate that you are trying to do something different, but what your customers will want is sites that can be found, work correctly in all browers, and make money.

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A lot of websites can be found, all websites can be left again just as easily.
We all place our bets, in the end it's not the developers who decide, but the customers. You'll have to make yours as well. TRONgui.com is our bet.

Incidentally - most interesting new site I've seen for a while? The new Virgin America flight booking website.

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I took a look at that website. We would classify that website as nothing short of horrible, and a perfect example of what is wrong with websites today. Several double links which overlap each other, adding to complexity on the front page. Bad navigation sorting logic etc.
A TRONgui solution would have looked totally different, but it would take us about a week to go through our process of structuring such a navigation.

We are planning on offering new solutions to various government websites in the future. We believe we can simplify things in a big way.

We never thought for a second, that a brand new concept would be praised or even accepted by the contemporary web design industry. That's just not how things work. But we are making a bet that the users will prefer something way more easy.

Our one-page-shopping solution is our first product example of a different approach. We are at version 0.9 at the moment. A long list of features is on the way.

We will be offering the users of the internet something new. Let's see where it all takes us.

Phil A. said:

What about people who use screen readers. Tables are a nightmare for accessible sites and this is one of the main reasons people are telling you tables are a bad option. It's not about being "trendy", it's about providing a decent website for all users, including those who use a screenreader

see these sites for a bit more background

http://webdesign.about.com/od/layout/a/aa111102a.htm
http://blog.silktide.com/2011/04/why-you-shouldnt-use-tables-for-layout-ever/

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Thanks for the info on tables.

As has been stated previously, it's not that we are against screen readers, favor tables over divs, or just insist on doing things opposite. We simply feel that most websites leaves the average person disabled, and we want to cater to this problem before ...we focus on the rest. In other words, we want to aid the majority first, and the minority second.
Most 'pro' websites might have screen reader friendly code, but leaves the average user baffled.

When time permits, making a div version of the site would be nice. The extra benefits are always welcomed. We simply focus on solving the big problems first, and the smaller problems later.

We knew that 'professionals' no more like to be challenged in their gospel, than a priest likes to be challenged in the validity of the scriptures. That's just how it is, and we feel this is part of the reason we even have an opportunity.

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Flood123 said:

You are 100% correct with your points. Unfortunately in this case what you said will fall on deaf ears. What you will get in return is "illogical" or the obligatory Steve Jobs "stay hungry stay foolish" quote. There is no convincing someone that "knows" the truth no matter what data there is to back up the point.

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Did our arguments fall on your deaf ears, because you already know the truth?
This is just rhetoric.

Everyone makes their own bets, and harvests accordingly. No one needs to convince the other. Right now we don't mind at all, to be a rare offering in the market place. Not in any way.

I wish the guy luck. I am not even commenting on the design itself. I am just talking about making it work with cross browser compatibility. If his concept doesn't have to do with the code behind it but more so the user experience, like the OP said, then why does it matter if he uses clean markup instead of tables. Anyway, "stay hun..." oh nevermind. Do epic ****.

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I can only write how we view these matters, but I can't make you read what I write.

Thanks for the support, seriously. We are very excited, and envision a totally different internet in our future, where we can all actually browse a site and find what we are looking for, where search won't even be necessary.

Cromulent said:

The fact that you don't care about disabled users of your websites is truly shocking.

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There seems to a real difficulty in reading and understanding when I write the opposite.
We feel that there's not enough concern for the majority of users being able to find their way around on websites. It's this priority we feel is shocking. Code for the minority first, ease of use for the majority second. We can see this priority play out in the focus on code and a total disinterest for the gui, expressed by code professionals in this thread.

They get upset if their priority is not adhered to and followed. Well, prepare to get really upset, we are going to release some really disturbingly easy to use products for the masses, and if we succeed in getting the word out we will hire code professionals with strict orders to up the code and leave 'easy' alone.

You should be following standards such as WCAG 2.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/) and WAI-ARIA 1.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/) in order to ensure that visitors no matter what their physical limitations are can still browse and enjoy your websites.

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As stated several times already, where others put these things first, and easy navigation for the majority second, we simply put easy first and the rest second. Only Microsoft is against web standards.

Using tables to design your website is effectively telling these people to "**** off" since they won't be able to use your site. I've worked with blind people before and they certainly wouldn't appreciate your efforts.

Perhaps try to read the thread enough times that you understand it, before you post? Then it would be interesting to hear some relevant feedback.

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You must learn to code properly or you will alienate users and stop them from using your site at all. So much for making "easy to use websites".

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I have a lot to learn about coding, and the coding experts has a lot to learn about gui. We focus on 'easy' for the majority first, and the minority later. Somehow later is being confused with never. The difference seems simple enough?

This isn't about "trendy coding", this is about doing your job properly. The fact that you are trying to sell your idea of table based designs to other people is frankly wrong. This isn't the 1990s any more. We have technology that solves those problems already.

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We feel the majority of the 'coding professionals' are doing an excellent job in coding, and a horrible job in building websites accessible for the vast majority of users.
So we evaluate 'doing your job properly' a little different than you do, but we don't try to convince you or anyone else in the industry, we simply build the alternative and understand that it's not up to you. In the end it's the users who decides.

It's getting a little old how simple and easy to understand points, are being ignored. Please read the thread before posting opposite claims.

Again thanks for everyones feedback, it's always interesting to see reactions.

As a user, I think most websites out there sucks big times. Not because of code, but because of what meets the eyes and mouse.

Everyone have a great day, and let's keep pushing the amazing internet forward. It can get a lot better out there.

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I started a thread about how the internet sucks. Then it turned into praise for TRONgui which we appreciate, and finally the builders of the horrible internet joined in and criticised the code used, which demonstrates perfectly that it's this focus on code and a less focus on gui, that is resulting in the websites we see out there today.

We build an alternative. The users will decide.

...and the internet really does suck, no really.

In our last investigation, we saw compelling evidence that IE is now at somewhere between 8 and 25%, not 53% as I stated earlier. Did I already post this? Well I think we can stand a rerun of the good news.

Once you drop from 90 + market share down to these levels, it's over. Pop the champagne.

IE sucks, "ie" it is no more. rules.