licentious radio

Thursday, June 13, 2002
[10:27:08 PM]

Web designers: Do no harm -- subtract no value!

A lot of what we do on the web is *read*. If your design makes the text harder to read than someone's default browser settings, you are subtracting value -- doing harm.

If the text is worthless, or you want to exclude anyone you isn't enough like you, by all means, design away: use 8 pixel black text on a charcoal gray background. (Except that when you do wrong, you set an example for others to follow.) But if you want to make the planet a better place, make it so people can read the stinking words -- and not just people who happen to have the same monitor/browser settings and eye-sight as you.

<flame>Yeah, and don't get me started on 11 pixel MS-proprietary typefaces with a javascript/cookie dependent alternative stylesheet set for "small" serif type.</flame>

<flame>Yeah, and don't get me started on "standards-compliant browsers are available for all platforms". Have you been to a public library lately? Do you really think many homeless people have access to Internet Explorer 5.5 Windows or Mozilla?</flame>

I get a little excited about this because the joy of the internet is access to information. The convenience of designers to work the same way they did in Pagemaker in 1988... that's a perverting criterion: the web is not a Macintosh. Then if you use the word "accessibility" to justify excluding people who aren't just like you, that gets my dander up.

[10:10:02 PM]
Dad came to town for a couple of nights. Got some visiting in. He's always been sort of a bleeding-edge computer guy, for the academic culture. Now he's up to multimedia, which for him mostly means databases of streaming video. That's fun stuff that the rest of us don't get to play with. There are tens of billions of dollars being left on the floor because the isps (where the servers are) charge too much for disk space, server cycles, and bandwidth. Wake up and smell the $$$ people! So Dad gets all the fun, and we get stinking Broadvision and Vignette.

I'm afraid Dad managed to trigger my rant on URLs. I'm about the only person I know who cares much about URLs -- what string of characters you use for the url.

I can go on at length about the need for urls to be abstract -- that is, not to map directly to the filename and directory structure you use to edit the source files. (Don't *ever* get me started about editing the files that go onto the server.)

Filenames are like an identity for the chunk of information. Directories provide namespaces for filenames, but also act frequently as metadata -- categorizing the information. If you use an applet or cgi script, the (internal) resource name is a convenience to the programmers. If you use a database, the equivalent of directories in the url is -- explicitly -- metadata. Even the "filename" would be metadata.

There are any number of ways to map from a public url to the chunk of information in the server's file system or database. You don't have to use public urls that depend on the location of the information in your content management system. Let the url be metadata. The advantage is that you can reorganize your publishing system (and even your categorization of information) without breaking the urls. Don't break urls! There is tremendous value to an organization the world when you keep the urls. You subtract tremendous value when you break urls.

If you have a sense that there is more to consider about urls, you might be interested in my essay on URLs [at my other website].