It seems to me that all WEBP’s problems stem from extremely delayed or still nonexistent support from various programs and platforms. Does anybody know if there’s a good reason for this?
Pokemon Center (which is the merchandise storefront for Pokemon—trading cards, plush, t-shirts, etc.) has an American site and a Japanese site, and the design differences between them are totally in line with what OP describes:
I've had emails about a blindness awareness event where the text was all in a screenshot of text. I don't know the state of the art of screen readers, but I have to assume that text is at least _better_. :)
"Interestingly, there’s also a considerable body of research about how different American and Chinese/Japanese perceive information."
There's an interesting point here. Stephen Toulmin once mentioned (unfortunately without giving a reference I know of) a difference in visual perception between Anglophones and those who live in huts. (I unfortunately can't remember the exact difference he pointed out, but I think it had something to do with how Anglophones live around rectangular buildings and identify something rectangular as a disinct group of information?)
the one insight missing from this otherwise decent piece was that "the look" that almost all Japanese TV has had, basically from the 1980s. large swaths of bitmapped text in garish colours and fonts splashed across many TV programmes, very often you'll see the heads of commentators superimposed, also with text. i'd say the "common" graphic design style of much of 1980s+ JP TV has a large bearing on how JP sites are used, perceived and "expected" to be now.
[edit: i work for a JP co in USA that deals with a lot of JP lang sites]
TV has been (or at least had been) at the center of Japanese media and culture for decades so it must have influenced quite a lot. There's also all the other stuff in Japan from magazines to billboards and the signs you see out on the street that are just as wacky and crammed. Japanese design is super crammed in general, and I think some of it comes down to just having less space relative to the number of people and things around, so the design has to be crammed on stuff like billboards and advertisements.
How? Genuine question, I'm curious. Unfortunately I don't speak German, pretty much the only German websites I visit regularly are dw and Hetzner, and they aren't too different from other European or American analogues.
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this annoys me a bit. if something is still functional and provides value it's not obsolete.
as a web dev for 16 years, japanese design seems like a nice antidote.
the web used to be closer to publishing and documents and now it's more advertising and marketing oriented.
nowadays i can't even save a jpeg without it appearing as a webp in my downloads folder. everything has become so annoying.
https://www.pokemoncenter.com/ (US)
https://www.pokemoncenter-online.com/sp/ (JPN)
The Japanese site gets way more/cooler merch, so I like to lurk and see what we're missing out on.
Just experienced this while booking a hotel. This makes it tricky because it breaks the Google Translate functionality in Chrome.
Luckily Yandex Translate supports OCR.
Deleted Comment
There's an interesting point here. Stephen Toulmin once mentioned (unfortunately without giving a reference I know of) a difference in visual perception between Anglophones and those who live in huts. (I unfortunately can't remember the exact difference he pointed out, but I think it had something to do with how Anglophones live around rectangular buildings and identify something rectangular as a disinct group of information?)
There was also a recent study indicating that people who grew up with different languages hear music and melodies differently too. https://twitter.com/courtneybhilton/status/16513251906962104...
[edit: i work for a JP co in USA that deals with a lot of JP lang sites]
Maybe you have something specific in mind?