chapter 12

Beyond Text/Pictures

ON FIRST DISCOVERING THAT THE WEB IS NOT PRINT, many designers see only the

drawbacks: poor typographic resolution; a limited pool of installed user fonts; bandwidth bugaboos; the need to compensate for browser, platform, and hardware differences; and the awkwardness of trying to read a computer screen in the bathroom.

As we start to become genuine web designers, though, most of us see more advantages than disadvantages in the Web’s distinctive differences from print. For example, instant worldwide distribution looks pretty darned good after wrestling with print shops and mail houses.

The longer we work at it, the more we marvel at the Web’s ability to provide universal access across seemingly unbridgeable gaps of technology, nationality, economic and political systems, and physical ability or disability.

As these barriers are crossed, the human spirit becomes less isolated, suspicion and intolerance begin to fade, and we learn to appreciate each other’s differences instead of fearing them. These benefits will greatly increase if the whole world gets to come along for the ride. They will greatly diminish if too many humans get left behind.

328 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures

This, the substance of the vision of the founders of the Web, should be enough. But there is more. In particular, there are the two profound differences between the Web and print that we’ll discuss in this chapter:

1.The ability to develop not simply static pages, but full-fledged, dynamic experiences

2.The visual, sonic, and interactive possibilities inherent in rich media, whether it is delivered through emerging web standards or popular plug-in technologies

These two unique strengths of the Web have tremendous implications for business and for art. Each has played a huge part in popularizing the medium. Each brims with powerful potential that designers and developers have barely begun to tap. Each also has the potential to be abused.

Figure 12.1

Nicola Stumpo’s “Destroy Everything” is a noncommercial, nonnarrative Flash site that eats

your screen alive. Stumpo’s emotions are probably inexpressible in any medium outside Macromedia Flash (http://www. abnormalbehaviorchild. com/).

Taking Your Talent to the Web

329

PRELUDE TO THE AFTERNOON OF DYNAMIC

WEBSITES

In Chapter 11, “The Joy of JavaScript,” we saw how JavaScript and its big brother, the Document Object Model (DOM), facilitate interactivity that printed media can only dream about. In the pages that follow, we’ll look at additional and powerful ways of making the Web more interactive.

Dynamic sites enable web users to locate information, store phone numbers in a shared contact database, buy holiday gifts without braving crowded shopping centers, or view “adult” material without shame until the baby-sitter barges in.

In this chapter, we will see how web agencies use server-side applications to build sites that let users do things. We’ll look at where the web designer

fits in and how server-side applications help us manage immense content sites or change text and appearance in response to user actions. We’ll also discuss how small shops and freelancers can get in on the action even if they don’t have casts of thousands and budgets of millions at their disposal.

We’ll also see how technologies like Java can compensate for “missing pieces” in our visitors’ browser setups or unleash full-fledged software programs that run right in the browser. And we’ll explore Java’s potential beyond the desktop.

Figure 12.2

Here is a tranquil moment outside the Eiffel Tower, captured in all its panoramic, Sensurround glory courtesy of Apple’s QuickTime VR—part of the QuickTime plug-in. Print cannot do this (http:// www.apple.com/).

330 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures: The Form of Function

You Can Never Be Too Rich Media

After all that, we’ll examine emerging “multimedia” web standards that are almost ready for prime time and take a peek and a poke at plug-in technologies that can radically enhance your sites—if used with respect for the realities of average web users.

These technologies are not for every site, but, when appropriate, they can enhance the web user’s experience tremendously. Used poorly, of course, they lead to less satisfying experiences. We will explore all these technologies and consider what causes both kinds of experiences.

Knowing you as we do, we’ll start with the drier, more technical stuff because if we saved it for later, you’d never read it.

THE FORM OF FUNCTION: DYNAMIC

TECHNOLOGIES

Think back to our earlier discussion of Perl versus JavaScript in Chapter 2,

“Designing for the Medium.” As far as the Web is concerned, Perl is most often used in server-side transactions, such as the processing of a visitorsubmitted mail form. You might remember that a server-side technology is one in which the computing process takes place on the web server (hence the name) rather than the end-user’s PC. With Perl, number-crunching tasks fall to the web server, while the visitor’s computer sits idly, waiting.

We contrasted Perl with JavaScript, whose actions take place in the browser. With JavaScript, the end-user’s computer (the “client,” in geek parlance) does the heavy lifting. JavaScript is a client-side technology. Naturally, the dynamic technologies we’re about to consider do some work on the client side and some on the server side. After all, the two sides are continually interacting. If the two sides, client and server, were not continually interacting, you would not have web transactions; you would just have machines sitting around doing nothing, like Teamsters.

But though they necessarily move from one realm to the other, most of the dynamic technologies we’re about to discuss do the bulk of their work either on the server or on the user’s desktop. Sometimes where they work