why i care

eric

1. the web is flat: you don’t own it and neither do i. on the web anything is possible and anyone is the author. on the downside we have designs like this one of mine and this one from “The Guru of Usability” (for more examples look around on my space for a few minutes). on the upside, we have those same sites. the web isn’t here to be beautiful, it’s here to be accessible. it’s a social tool, and that’s what it was built for. communication. from everyone to everyone with no borders. talk about open-source.
2. innovation, risk and the bi-polar web: because the web is so open and so new, it is coninuously growing and changing. Developers, designers and disgustingly huge corporations continue to innovate new web technologies and standards. On the downside we have Microsoft Internet Explorer unable to correctly display your most basic semantically-correct website. On the upside we have AJAX, Firefox extensions, sourceforge.net, XHTML, CSS3 and new technologies and features coming along every day. The two come together (though the MSIE team sure could step it up a notch - and I hear they might be with IE7). New innovations from browser developers can lead to amazing new web features, or they can quickly become deprecated juggernauts destroying the friendly web for the rest of us. The W3 is here to help keep everything moving in the right direction. think of them as web therapy.
3. web to the seventh generation: in a post on this very site, Goshen Boy says:

   Trust me, great websites (that are effective) have much less to do with validation errors (or lack their of) than usability, color, style, feelings, and all that other good stuff.

   and unfortunately he is absolutely right in the short term. but the web is not a short term medium. with innovation and change coming along at such a rapid pace, any good design has to not only work now, but remain accessible for at least the next twenty browser upgrades (in the same number of browsers). it just isn’t possible for you to update your site that often. and yes, with the IE juggernaut still on the loose, we also have a lot to think about for backwards-compatability - but that’s an additional concern not an alternative one. we can’t ignore the future because the present isn’t perfect. it’s time to start desiging sites (and browsers) that follow the standards - and have “all that other good stuff” - because what we do on the web now determines where the web can go from here.

4. web 2.0: web 2.0 is two things. first it is an outbreak of the best flat-web technology you could imagine. with tools like AJAX and CSS, user-friendly, interactive, communal sites are taking off. designers and programmers are both begining to care about their users - thinking about what makes a site friendly, usable, accessible, flexible and innovative. the programmers are talking more about standards validation and the semantic web while designers are using larger, more readable sans-serif fonts, avoiding blink tags, and overall giving the web a friendlier feel. on the downside, there’s design trends going around that make every site look identical to the last site, and some designers are more interested in drop-shadows than anything actually interesting or original. in reality, i have nothing against drop-shadows, rounded corners, gradients (ok, i do have something against gradients), and grey/blue color palettes (in fact several of these things make their way into my sites). i do have a problem with every single website in the world looking the same, and designers mindlessly following trends when there’s plenty of innovation to be done.
5. how i learned to stop worrying and love the internet: the internet immediately becomes the worst enemy of any print designer. especially the fluid, semantic, valid internet. all of your control is removed in favor of some concept of user accessability. suddenly you are considered a fascist pig if you want your website to look the same beautiful way you designed it for everyone that visits your site. so what are you supposed to do? i have an idea: design for the internet, you fascist pig.

   it’s a different game, but once you understand the rules the limitations become a challenge and you start playing with all the other possibilities. you can’t do it the way you always did, simply laying out static text on a page. your text is going to move around on you, out of your control. what you can do is give it advice. your immediate instinct is to hold everything in place, position everything absolutely or use tables, no-wrap tags, pixel widths, anything to keep that text right where you put it. you can try that all you want, but it’ll just break it when i visit your site with my differently-abled browser, and if your content is all mangled by semantically-incorrect jargon, i’m going to get frustrated and go somewhere else. then i’m going to write nasty posts about you on my blog, and be forced to apologize about it later. neither of us will be happy. the world will be a worse place for us all to live.

   start thinking differently. it’s not about whether it breaks but how it breaks. what you’re designing is dynamic. incorporate movement. make it interactive. make it fun to play with. you can also design multiple looks for the same content - but it will be a lot easier to do if you code by the rules. the W3 is your friend and the semantic web will make your life a whole lot more exciting if you learn to play with it. learn to cheat without ever breaking the rules. the web’s a playground. it’s a sandbox. don’t conquer it, play with it. user-friendly requires a personality and a sense of humor - not just a negative ‘realistic’ outlook on the state of browser support. first be forwards-compatible, then worry about being backwards-compatible.

   then go kiss your lover and get a good night’s sleep.