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This gets at the crux of it, if you take "timeless" literally:

UI is culture. And what made culture is timeless? The undergraduate discussion group might hit on Shakespeare, the Pyramids, the King James Bible, or Portal II. In the end there's no common ground except that the value of culture itself is context-sensitive.

Anyway, it's all a red herring because "timeless" in this article is misused; the author just means "classic"



An ancient Sumerian ledger:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1250/0*7LNb7XKpR6vAdsBH....

A ledger from the 1700s:

https://recordoffice.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/d2375m-277-...

I think there are some UIs that almost perfectly fit the function; and they are the candidates for timelessness.


The ancient Sumerian one looks a bit like Excel.

I think there are some limitation as to how you can lay stuff out and what the human brain is happy with. It's not all culture.

Like with a lot of sites with flashy weird shit I use a reader view extension to make it look like books and pages have looked for centuries. Not so much because its the fashion but it's just clearer that way.


These are extreme exceptions and hardly the point of the article.


Yup agree. Classic is a much better expression as it doesn't falsely imply some sort of objective criteria.




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