Taking Your Talent to the Web

23

much less the Web. And many defining characteristics of the modern Web ($20 unlimited access dialups, 56K modems, free browsers) were established by 1995-96, a time when most web users were also web designers, and the word “commerce” did not begin with the letter “e.” Still, the Web has expanded like nobody’s business since business came online. And if you ask most normal humans who’ve gone online in the past few years why they bought a computer and signed up for an Internet account, “shopping” seems to top the list.

Different Purposes, Different Methodologies

It is still possible for a lone web designer or small team to create personal, artistic, and corporate sites using an image editor, HTML, style sheets, and JavaScript. But the “lone rider” approach is increasingly rare in the corporate web development space. Today, teams of specialists with oddsounding job titles develop most sites collaboratively. (See Chapter 5, "The Obligatory Glossary” and Chapter 7, “Riding the Project Life Cycle,” for the funky titles and the typical web project life cycle.) It is not your job to program a shopping cart or develop a database. It is your job to understand where your work fits into the bigger picture.

As a professional web designer, you will work closely with programmers to implement the appropriate interactivity in every site. You also might be called upon to execute rudimentary interactivity yourself—for instance, writing JavaScript to swap images on navigational menus.

WEB AGNOSTICISM

Design for the Web is also different because the Web is not a fixed medium. It has no size, no inks, no paper stock. Even your typographic choices may end up as mere suggestions. That’s because the Web is platform-agnostic and device-independent. Good web design adapts to different browsers, monitors, and computing systems. What’s sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander. More literally, what’s Geneva for the Mac may be Arial for Windows; what’s VBScript for Windows may be error messages for Mac and Linux users. (So don’t use VBScript to build websites.)

24 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Web Agnosticism

Looking at poorly implemented sites, you could come away with the impression that the Web is a Windows application or even an extension of the Windows desktop. And there are certainly marketers who’d like you to believe that. But it just ain’t so.

Berners-Lee and Caillou invented the Web on a NeXT computer. The first browser ever released was for UNIX, the second for Mac OS. Berners-Lee envisioned the Web as a completely portable medium—one that could be accessed not only by every computer operating system (including dumb terminals), but also by all kinds of devices from hand-held Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to telephones and other common appliances. Slowly and sometimes painfully, everything Berners-Lee envisioned in 1990 has been coming true.

To help the Web evolve in an orderly fashion, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C (www.w3.org). It’s a place where university professors join engineers from companies such as Sun, Microsoft, AOL/Netscape, IBM, Compaq, and Apple to hammer out common technological standards, such as HTML and CSS…and more recently, Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the Document Object Model (DOM). For a complete listing of W3C member organizations, see the following web page: www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List.

Don’t worry about what the acronyms stand for at the moment. Just dig the concept: If everyone supports the same standards (or “Recommendations,” in W3C parlance), then designers and programmers will have the tools they need to deliver a dynamic and attractive Web that works for any human being, on any platform or device. Sweet, smart, simple.

Sadly, due to competitive pressures, the desire to innovate, and sheer cussedness, the companies that make web browsers have not always done a superb job of implementing commonly shared standards. In fact, until quite recently, you could argue that their support for these standards was sometimes downright shoddy. You might even be forgiven for suspecting that browser makers deliberately avoided fully implementing any standard for fear that supporting common standards would hurt business.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

25

In the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned that the Web was spawned as a beautiful medium for the delivery of physics papers. And that to deliver commercially viable sites—sites with some semblance of visual appeal— web designers felt they had no choice but to “hack” HTML, forcing the deliberately primitive markup language to serve their aesthetic needs. Netscape (now AOL) joined web designers in extending HTML beyond its creators’ intentions.

Initially, the Web was a one-horse town. If you wanted to design a commercial site, you wrote nonstandard HTML that was “optimized” for Netscape’s browser. Once Microsoft’s browser entered the picture, all hell broke loose, as two powerful software companies began deforming HTML in mutually exclusive ways.

Browser development was originally viewed as just another genre of software development. Adobe Illustrator competes with Macromedia Freehand by offering features Freehand lacks. Freehand does the same to Illustrator. God Bless America.

Similarly, Netscape competed with Microsoft (and vice versa) by offering functionality not supported by the competitor’s product. Each company hoped these unique features would seduce web developers into creating sites optimized for its browser alone.

Eventually, the market split in two. Though a tiny percentage of web users sported alternative browsers including Lynx, Mosaic, Opera, and Amaya, basically 50% of the market was using Netscape’s browser; the other 50% was using Microsoft’s. To create “technologically advanced” sites for their clients without alienating half the potential visitors, designers and developers felt obliged to create Netscape-specific and Microsoft-specific versions of their sites. Clients then paid more than they should have to support the development of these incompatible site versions. Thanks in part to protests from groups such as The Web Standards Project (www.webstandards.org) and mainly to the hard work of browser company engineers, support for common standards is constantly improving—though not without occasional backsliding.

26 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Web Agnosticism

Complicating the issue, many of today’s web standards were yesterday’s proprietary innovations: things that worked only in one browser or another. You can’t blame Wendy’s for not offering McDonald’s secret sauce, and you can’t fault browser companies for failing to implement technology invented by their competitors.

When Netscape unveiled <FRAMES> (the ability to place one web page inside another), the technology was widely adopted by designers and developers. Refer back to Figure 2.3, Assembler.org, for an example of the way frames work. The bottom frame contains a menu; the top frame contains the content. Clicking the menu changes the content by loading a new content frame. Both frames are controlled by yet a third document, called the <FRAMESET>, which links to the frames, establishes their size and positioning relative to one another, and determines such niceties as whether or not the user can resize a given frame.

Eventually Netscape brought its invention to the W3C. Much later, it ended up as part of a temporary standard: the HTML 4 Transitional Recommendation. It took Microsoft a while to support frames, because Microsoft’s browser developers had to reverse-engineer Netscape’s invention to figure out how it worked. Ironically enough, Microsoft’s 4.0 browser eventually supported frames better than Netscape’s.

In 1995, Netscape came up with a programming language initially called LiveScript and eventually renamed JavaScript. Besides being easy to learn (at least, as far as programming languages go), JavaScript made web pages far more dynamic. And it did this without straining the computers used to serve web pages (servers), because the technology worked in the user’s browser instead of having to be processed by the server itself—the way Perl scripts and other traditional programming languages had been. With less strain on the server, more web pages could be served faster. Thus, JavaScript was bandwidth-friendly.

JavaScript eventually became a standard, but not before putting Microsoft at a competitive disadvantage for several years. The latest, “standard” version of JavaScript is referred to as ECMAScript, which sounds like the noise our Uncle Carl used to make in the morning. Don’t worry—’most everybody still calls it JavaScript, which isn’t exactly Yeatsian poetry either, come to