6 WHY: Splash Screen: Meet the Medium
MEET THE MEDIUM
The Web is a part of the Internet, a group of interconnected computer networks that spans the globe. Web servers deliver content of many kinds, much of it connected to other content via hyperlinks and therefore referred to as hypertext. Most of these documents are written in a simple markup language called HTML, about which we will have much more to say. But web servers aren’t limited to publishing HTML documents; they can deliver almost any digital content you care to envision.
Put another way, the Web is a medium, like print or television. It is available worldwide to anyone with an Internet connection. Unlike with print or television, though, the Web is a two-way street. Not only can anyone with an Internet connection view and interact with websites, he or she also can create or contribute to such sites.
At this moment in history, the Web is usually experienced on a desktop computer. This is changing rapidly, though, as web-enabled cell phones and Palm Pilots become Yuppie accessories that make you just want to slap them. (The Yuppies, not the accessories.)
Desktop web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera Software’s Opera, are used to view and interact with the content on websites. These “sites” are collections of web documents published online at specific virtual locations. They’re called sites, not books, because the Web is not print and because the founders of the Web were obsessed with solving basic problems such as that of location. Where do web documents go? Where can people be assured of retrieving them? The founders of the Web developed a system of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), affording every web document the luxury of a permanent address— hence, a site collection, not a book collection.
By the way, while URLs make possible a permanent address for every web document, such permanence is not guaranteed. Companies go out of business and take down their sites; products are replaced by newer models, and the old web pages go offline; news and information sites hampered by limited server space kill old stories to make room for new ones; or a
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new publishing system comes online, and old web addresses such as www.url.com/issues/01/03/story.html are replaced by new robotgenerated URLs such as www.url.com/content.cgi?date=2001-03-21/ article.cgi?id=46&page=1.
Outside the corporate web sphere, personal sites go offline when their creators get bored or they move to a new location, and the creator neglects to leave a forwarding address. There are as many scenarios as there are web pages that have disappeared. This is a problem for web users who bookmark certain pages in hopes of revisiting them and for directories such as Yahoo.com or search engines such as Google.com whose business is to connect seekers of specific information with sites that meet their needs.
Expanding Horizons
Searches and similar activities underscore the fact that the web experience is interactive—another difference between it and print and TV. Visitors not only link from page to page at their discretion, they also can post their own content to some sites, shop at others, play games, or alter the design elements to suit their tastes at still others.
Needless to say, these interactive aspects of the Web present incredible design challenges and opportunities, which grow more interesting and more sophisticated as the Web’s capabilities expand. And they are expanding every minute. While we wrote this book, Microsoft came out with IE5.5, Opera unveiled Opera 5, Netscape produced Navigator 6, and Macromedia premiered Flash 5. To varying degrees, all four products have changed profoundly what the Web can be—the three browsers by offering increased support for powerful web standards such as CSS, XML, and the DOM and Flash 5 by providing richer (though proprietary) design and programming tools.
Note
We will discuss CSS, XML, and the DOM in due course. If you're nervous or simply curious, skip ahead to Chapter 5, "The Obligatory Glossary," then come on back.
8 WHY: Splash Screen: Meet the Medium
In terms of technological acceptance, the Web has grown faster than any medium in history. In 1990, there were two “wired persons” (people connected to the Web): Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist who invented the Web, and his friend and colleague Robert Caillou. By 1993, there were 90,000 web users. Two years later, there were three million. By early 1999, that number had grown to over 200 million, 80 million of them in the U.S. alone. Six months later, estimates were well over 300 million. Soon there will be more web users than McDonald’s burgers sold. Fortunately, no animals were harmed in the making of the Web.
Computers will always be unaffordable for some folks, and others simply dislike technology. How will the Web keep growing after everyone with the means and desire has bought a computer and a modem (or whatever highspeed connectivity that replaces the modem)?
It will grow by slipping past its existing borders. Drivers will receive directions from devices in their cars without realizing that the data is stored on a site you may have designed. Technophobes will interact with sites while
finding out local movie times over the phone. They won’t know they’re getting information from the Web; for them this will simply be a conventional telephone experience. You won’t be responsible for porting the data (geekspeak for translating web content into something a web-enabled phone can understand), but your sites will undoubtedly reach people who have never touched a “traditional” web browser.
Within the next five to ten years, it’s fair to say that “everyone” will use the Web, just as “everyone” uses the telephone. Of course, there are human beings who don’t use the phone (and many who don’t answer it, especially if they owe you money), but we’re speaking in generalities to emphasize a simple point:
You are about to begin designing for a medium that will eventually reach practically every home and office in every corner of the world. Your work will potentially affect the lives of billions. You will never be lonely or go hungry again. But on the flip side of that joyous news, you will face new challenges and will need to learn new skills throughout your web career.
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“Billions” sounds like a pretty daunting audience. But as with all design, remember that you’re not trying to reach or please everyone. If you design to communicate ideas and if your clients are focused enough to have products or causes worth sharing with specific people, then the right hundreds, thousands, or millions of people will visit and be enriched by your sites.
“Your sites.” It sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Working the Net…Without a Net
Given this vast, worldwide audience, you will no longer be able to assume certain things—for instance, that everyone who visits the site speaks English. Or that every visitor has an equally powerful computer, an equally up- to-date browser, or an equally glorious monitor with which to view your work. You can’t even assume that all your visitors can view your work at all, in the conventional sense of that word. Millions of people with visual (and other) disabilities use the Web every day; believe it or not, your designs can accommodate them. (We’ll talk about how that’s done throughout the book.)
In art direction and graphic design, before you even begin conceptualizing your approach, you must target your audience and learn the size of the medium you’ll be working with (magazine spread, quarter-page newspaper, or outdoor billboard). On the Web, audience projection is an imperfect science at best, and there are no absolute sizes, or absolute anything else. But don’t reach for the Absolut vodka—there’s nothing to fear. Your design vocabulary is simply going to enlarge. In fact, your whole conception of what it means to design will expand.
While it broadens in its reach, the Web also is constantly increasing its capabilities—from the early, text-only Web, to text plus images, to streaming media (audio, video, and multimedia environments created in Flash, Shockwave, and Java). From static pages, to dynamically generated pages, to sites to which the word “page” does not apply at all. (For a taste, visit www.eneri.net, www.photomontage.com, or www.once-upon- a-forest.com.)
10 WHY: Splash Screen: Meet the Medium
Most of the time in this book, we’ll be discussing the Web as we know it and as your clients understand it: an interactive digital medium accessed via a desktop computer with an Internet connection and viewed by means of a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, or Opera.
We also will assume that you’ve used the Web yourself. Maybe you while away the hours in a chat room where you’re known as HotBuns32 or you spend half your life checking other people’s bleeding edge site designs. Perhaps you just check your email once a week (and pretend you haven’t read it when it’s from a relative) or log on once a year to save $5 on a Mother’s Day bouquet. If you haven’t done any of this, go online now, and we’ll talk later.
Though we’ll focus on the Web you know, we also will talk about the ways the Web is changing—because those changes will have as profound an impact on your career as they will on our civilization. What you’ll learn in this book is only the beginning. (If you’re not comfortable with the idea that a career in web design necessitates continual learning, put this book down now and back slowly away.)
On the other hand, you might like the idea that the Web is steadily expanding its borders. That people can already access some web content via handheld devices such as Palm Pilots. That there are web phones out there and browsers for the blind. That web-based navigation systems are finding their way into the cars and trucks we drive. That there is actually a prototype web refrigerator, and that before we get much older almost every device imaginable will be accessing the Web in some way or other—whether it needs to or not.
All these applications will require the skills of talented designers (and programmers, of course). So congratulations on making an absolutely brilliant career move. Now buy this book so you can actually start doing something about all this.
If you’re curious about how the heck this Web thing got started, see Chapter 4, “How This Web Thing Got Started.” If you’re unsure of your terminology, see Chapter 5, “The Obligatory Glossary.” You’ll find both chapters in Part 2, “WHO,” in the middle of this book, along with useful material on