The Bitter Pill

Back in 1994-95, when I first started working on the web and the web was young, web pages were generally designed around one simple and near-universal concept: providing information to as many people as possible in most efficient and effective way possible.

Much of that mindset comes from the academic, technical and military origins of the Web, where nerdy types would use the ‘net as a way of publishing and collaborating on the sorts of dense, text-heavy types of topics academics seem to love. As a side note, why the fledgling HTML language never really developed an effective way of producing mathematical notation is something of a mystery to me, given these roots in academia.

The state of hardware and software back then also contributed to the text-heavy nature of web pages back then. Slow modems, slow processors, small screens, limited color support and paleolithic browsers all meant that your big images and fancy effects would be seen poorly, if at all.

Finally, writing HTML back then was both relatively difficult (at least in comparison to knocking it out in the dreaded FrontPage) and the skillsets of HTML writers was generally pretty meager. This was, after all, a brand new thing. Few, if any, web wranglers had yet developed their extensive knowledge of various browser bugs.

So what the user got was a web tailor-made for sharing information and ideas that they could access from any browser, with any configuration, and little blocking them from getting the information (other than the download speed of their modem). And then it all went wrong…

Advertising types, misguided graphic designers, and managers rushing to get the company brochure online turned the web into something else entirely: a whole bunch of web pages that may have been pretty, sometimes, but they were also static, boring, bereft of ideas and pretty demanding on the user.

The web went from pages full of expertise on a variety of topics — everything from quantum mechanics to kittens named Fluffy — to pages that literally had no content whatsoever but did require you to have three different obscure plugins for Internet Explorer on Windows.

Don’t have IE for Windows? Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you dirty non-conformist.

Which is all a really long-winded way of looking at today’s Web and seeing the pendulum swinging back. What goes around comes around.

CSS, blogs, the accessibility movement, community/sharing-based sites, the recognition of the value of content and ideas by the marketing people, and the rise of unobtrusive DOM-based Javascript are all converging to create a new web (Web 2.0, if you must, but please don’t).

Back in 1994, every HTML tutorial seemed covered how to properly mark up a document: h1, h2, h3 etc. for headers, p for paragraphs, ul for unordered lists, and so on. In other words, back in ‘94, when you learned to mark up a page, you were learning how to mark it up semantically, with each element tagged according to its meaning/use.

Today, the “semantic” web is gaining new ground, and not marking up your code properly is a big no-no.

Back in 1994, you were encouraged to use both images and code sparingly, in consideration of those with slow browsers. Remember the Bandwidth Conservation Society?

Today, cell phones and other low-bandwidth devices are again emphasizing the need for lean, clean pages.

And back in 1994, you were reminded the user may not have the fancy brand-new 15″ monitor with thousands of colors you were using, so you should make sure your page is readable and usable under the widest possible variety of circumstances.

Today alternate user agents, text readers, RSS, print styles and who-knows-what future technologies again encourage the smart web folks to make their sites (and their site content) usable and accessible, no matter how the user is experiencing it.

In other words, what’s old has become new again, which is why the web circa 2006 is both more interesting and more informative than it has been in years. And why your pretty Flash site may be the bucket on which you’ll ride to Hell. These days, content is once again king, and the user is once again being offered something in return for their time. It’s a good time to be a web guy.

More thoughts on this, courtesy of Robert Scano: A Journey Through Accessibility.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 9:34 am and is filed under General, Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.