Slashdot's Vastu 386
nanopolitan writes "Wired has a story on harmonious website design according to Vastu, 'the Indian counterpart of feng shui'. The graphic accompanying the story has an analysis of Slashdot's design by Dr. Smita Narang. Her verdict? This site is 'in desperate need of balance'." From the article: "Thirty-year-old Smita Narang is rapidly becoming one of India's hottest Web designers. Her method: applying vastu shastra, the Indian counterpart of feng shui, to the online realm. The process entails mapping page attributes - HTML, colors, graphics - to elements like fire, water, and air. 'Any disturbance of these established elements can cause an imbalance in the site that directly affects its business,' Narang says."
And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Only people with double-digit IQ or a severe case of money poisoning actually listen to these jackasses.
Page length (Score:5, Insightful)
People who advocate short page lengths probably don't use the web for information.
And yes I think google should default to 100 results
Re:Penn and Teller (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't live so close to water that it washes your house away. Don't live so far away from water that it's an inordinate pain in the ass to get. Don't live close to the edges of cliffs which might collapse, or which you might fall off of. Do live in a location where your dwelling has as much protection from the elements as possible. But putting it directly in the path of the tree that looks kind of rotted and is about to fall it probably a bad idea too. Don't shit where you eat or are likely to drink. The sun is bright and hot, avoid suffering it unnecessarily. But the sun is also helpful, make sure you've got enough of it.
All it is are a set of building codes set to a spiritual narrative that's supposed to make it easy to remember. A smart person with good aesthetic sensibilities is required to make it work. Well compensated professionals in Asia, they get paid because they have some measure of the later, and more than some skill blending Confusian sensibilities with modern needs and tastes. The people on Bullshit! that's not what they're doing. They're banking on the ignorance of others.
The real tenents, with the mysticism striped away, they make a lot of sense to me. Except for the living underneath a rotting tree thing. Look, you buy the home you can afford.
Re:Page length (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot was just redesigned (Score:3, Insightful)
Feng Shui is correct (Score:4, Insightful)
While the explanations claiming "energies" for Feng Shui may not be correct, the human psychology behind it is. Those same principles may or may not be applicable with regards to web design, but don't discount entirely that which you clearly do not understand.
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:2, Insightful)
Will putting a water fountain in a "harsh corner" improve your finances? Of course not, not in a direct causitive way.
Does living in a shithole make you less motivated and less likely to attract friends and influential people to help you make money? Fuckin A right it does.
So, does paying attention to your surroundings and having a well-put together harmonious environment overall improve your life? How could it not?
Only people with a double-digit IQ believe that the world is Manichean and things are only completely useful or completely worthless...
Re:Feng Shui is correct (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. There's a sucker born every minute.
"Those same principles may or may not be applicable with regards to web design, but don't discount entirely that which you clearly do not understand."
Yeah. And my cash-mishandling invisible man in the sky who is going to sentence me to eternity of fire and brimstone and suffering...but loves me can beat up yours too!
The problem is, I DO understand it. This is why I call it like I see it. Bullshit. First to last.
Re:Shouldn't there be a foot icon? (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought it was obnoxious and just goes to further the promotion of bullshit pseudoscience. You know, vastu shastra, like feng shui, is really nothing more than prescientific observations on how to situate a building so it doesn't get flooded, have dirt blown in by prevailing winds, etc (hence the 'feng' and 'shui' in feng shui). It makes this article all the more comical. Thankfully, everyone knows it's bullshit, so no one's listening to this jerk, right? ...Right? RIGHT?
Re:Penn and Teller (Score:2, Insightful)
Imperfect, and incomplete though it may be, replete with mystical jargon though it is, it is not without some truth, wisdom and value. It is rigorously practiced, there is a stratification of hard earned skill, and it does incorporate observations of the natural world. (Drowing is bad, a typhoon folding your house isn't much better, bright light, or baking in the summer heat are uncomfortable.) While it might not be a suitible foundation for a class in a College of Engineering, it isn't bullshit. Considering the population Feng Shui was ment to serve, not terribly far removed from American evangelist lifestyles, the sprititual terms and analogies such as Shar Chi et al, are probably necessary just to move the process along. The soundness of the fundemental tenents of the art shouldn't be judged how they are traditionally communicated. No more than we should decided "compassion" is an outmoded and over-all bad idea based on how Southern Baptists occasionally misapply it in the debates on setting national policies.
Re:Feng Shui is correct (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's you who doesn't understand "basic scientific principles". The 1st sentence you posted is, well, wrong. It's a well-known fallacy. You can conclude many true things based on the fact that the sky is red. All you need is a consistent set of "rules" for such deductions to be made.
If you are going to pretend you are some science advocate at least get it right, and keep an open mind. Just because there are some things you don't understand, it doesn't mean they are wrong. It just means you don't understand them. Oriental cultures have been around for a while. Don't underestimate what centuries of observation of human behaviour can produce. There are some things you can know wihtout knowing how they work. I for one am not a feng-shui fan but don't discredit a thousand year old discipline just because some guy is making money out of it.
Whenever in doubt, remember Godel. There are always some loose ends.
Re:And like feng shui, IT'S BULLSHIT! (Score:5, Insightful)
And has a fixed-width table! (Score:2, Insightful)
Even worse than being ugly, the page uses fixed-width tables for layout:
She shouldn't be writing books on web design; she needs to read quite a few of them first.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards... (Score:2, Insightful)
That being said, the concepts of Vastu itself are completely unrelated to implementation. She is not calling herself a technical expert on HTML. She is calling herself someone who understands human psychology as it applies to web design, which is at least a potentially interesting idea.
Personally, I think you web standards guys are way too anal. HTML was originally designed with a very loose syntax, and that's how many people were taught to use it. It takes hours of hard, tedious work to make a site written to the old standards validate, and in the end the site doesn't look any different than it did before.
For instance, you say this is morally bad:
<a href = http://amazing.com/>amazing.com</a>
I say it's much easier to write than
<a href = "http://amazing.com/">amazing.com</a>
and far less prone to error, since one of the most common errors is leaving out the trailing quote:
<a href = "http://amazing.com/>amazing.com</a>
Why not keep HTML easy for humans to write? Why make it harder to write programs to write HTML, by forcing us to gum things up with quotes when it doesn't make the slightest difference in any browser used today?
The guy on the street trying to make a living hates web standards and validation because of things like this. I think you would find that there would be much more support for web standards and validation if you didn't make them so unnecessarily anal and only flagged truly ambiguous cases.
To see hundreds of errors where you said
<img src = "foo.gif" height = 100 width = 100>
when you should have said
<img src = "foo.gif" height = "100" width = "100">
is just plain silly. The numbers are completely umambiguous unquoted.
Well, I suppose that was too long an aside, but the point is that HTML is not a programming language and as someone who has been using HTML since 1994 I don't see why it should be thought of one now.
And I certainly would not criticise someone trying to make a psychological point for HTML problems. I would instead listen to her points and value them entirely independently of the correctness of her HTML. It's in no way important outside of the web standard geek universe.
Incidentally, I think her page design was ghastly. Attack her on her own turf, and in my opinion you'll be a lot more successful. And that's my point.
D
Re:Shouldn't there be a foot icon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Feng shui and vastu and the like are, at least partially, non-western models for something that could generally be called aesthetic experience. There are also western models for aesthetics. One could even concieve of usability research as a kind of scientification of a subset of aesthetics.
Re:We don' need no steenking standards... (Score:3, Insightful)
Less prone? It's an error itself! It's equivalent to this code:
If you use a slash in an attribute value, that value must be quoted. It's fallout from the SHORTTAG NET that lets you specify attribute values like "checked" without including a name for the attribute.
And sorry, if you think leaving out quotes is "much easier", then you must be typing with your nose.
What's difficult about quoting all values? It's a damn sight easier for newbies than remembering when it's okay and when it isn't okay to skip quoting, based on an obscure part of SGML.
And the browsers used tomorrow? You think it's fun going back and fixing dozens of sites when a new browser version comes out because you cut corners? Don't say it won't happen, it's happened for every major browser release in the past ten years.
And what about non-browsers? Do you know that search engine crawlers won't slip up on your buggy code? Even if you can show that this is the case today, search engines are constantly tweaking their code. I don't want to explain to a client that they aren't in Google because I thought I could cut corners to save myself typing two whole characters.
It's got nothing to do with programming. Ever hear Postel's Law? "Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in which you accept from others." Seeing how many bugs you can fit into your markup before your favourite browsers start tripping up on it is not "being conservative in what you do".
Re:We don' need no steenking standards... (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time you wrote a parser? Regex engine? Context free grammar?
These things exist for a reason. English is hard to process in a computer because it's contextual. Would you argue that removing spacing from English is ok because many ideogram-based languages depend on context to tell you what the correct spacing of a sentence is?
What is the proper segmentation of "theyouthevent" ? They you the vent? The youth event? The you the vent? What if there were more words? Do you like executing this algorithm (which is O(n^2) at least) every time you get a sentence? What if we decided that context determined sentence length as well?
You do not know of what you speak. I wish those mods hadn't wasted their points on you, since what you want is a meta-language that can be freely (and slowly) parsed by some interpreter before it generates something that can actually be parsed real time over a (possibly very fast) connection on a network.