Web - Usability - Humor
Monday, March 4, 2002[10:05:31 PM]
The three ground-rules of web design, circa 1997: 1) Assume a 17-inch monitor. 2) Pretend no one changes their browser settings. 3) Wish Javascript would work.
[9:55:22 PM]
In the beginning, html was about pageless content. Professors would type their papers, put them on the web, and never edit them again. The papers needed no page-junk -- no navigation links around the edges, and certainly no advertising/branding.
When marketing geniuses got hold of html, they gave us page-junk in torrents. Instead of lone professors, teams built websites. That meant we need content management systems.
The w3c still seems bent on pageless content. For example, you could solve the fundamental usability problem by having a tag similar to <body> that tells you which part of a page corresponds to the content of the url -- which part isn't page-junk. It could be a <content> tag, for all I care. Give us that tag, and any program can immediately separate the wheat from the chaff.
The design community came from Quark Express and Macromedia Director. That is, some want the web to be a wysiyg page layout program, and the rest want it to be a multimedia presentation tool. On both accounts their agenda is identical functionality in browsers, either like you have in a printed magazine, or like you have in a multimedia cd-rom.
As a whole, the design community seems to assume a dumb server. That is, a server that doesn't make decisions about what to deliver to the client (the web browser). They not only don't have experience programming servers, they typically don't have access to the servers.
The w3c takes this perspective as well, trying to put both decision-making (which stylesheet to use) and programming (xslt) into the web browser.
The decision-making on the client will fail because the w3c cannot anticipate the variety of differentiation websites will want to make. That is, the w3c will give us a few options, but we will want millions.
The programming on the client will fail because xslt is a freaking nightmare, and because putting the programming into the client is a monopolist's device. What I mean by that is that it will give Microsoft even more leeway continually to differentiate its browser with quirks, bugs, partial implementations of future standards, and not-quite-complete implementations of current standards.
Strangely, automated publishing from content management systems and decision-making servers are liberating for authors and users. We don't care about wysiwyg page-layout enthusiasts because they will eventually get over it. We don't care much about multimedia enthusiasts, because most of them are so awful at it, and because most of the juice is in multi-directional text -- weblogs, for instance.
The essential flaw in "web standards" is that it only works if there is *one* standard. Fortunately, there will always be progress, so there will always be old browsers that do not implement the newest standard. And there will always be devices that are so disparate that the same *page-junk* cannot be made to work for all of them.
Yes, cascading stylesheets should cut down on bandwidth -- make pages smaller, and therefore less expensive to serve. That's a good thing. Frankly, though, the w3c could help a lot more if they would just give us a client-side include. This would let the browser cache all the page-junk separately from the content. (No, iframes don't count because they require you to define a pixel region for the frame, and sizing based on pixels is only useful to people who pretend there is no variety in display devices and settings.)
1) Intensive processing in the publish phase -- getting content from the content management system to the web server. 2) Decision-making by the web server about what version of the content to deliver. 3) Clients of all sorts, ranging from desktops with large monitors to handhelds and cell phones.
Access to all devices! Required Javascript, Flash, and cookies should always be opt-in -- the user chooses to get a fancier version of the website. If a homeless person can't use your website from a text-only browser in a library, that's a shame. (Assuming you have content that a human being would care about.)
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:57:45 PM.