When CSS first became en vogue and the phrase “separation of content and design” escaped the narrow corridors of niche institutions, I used an iteration of my own website’s design to wax philosophical on the State of the Art. From my perspective, the content-generators, the Web intelligentsia, began to shift the focus of their energy toward the “design” portion of the equation. Tables yielded to divisions, tags to styles, and huge amounts of time and grief were lost to the downward spiral of standards and compatibility.
And before long, the competitiveness of design led to hair’s-breadth hacks of language specifications falling into common use--what modern CSS framework doesn’t include an “if-IE” conditional? Or negative margins somewhere? These hacks are symptomatic. But the people who make them mislay the blame. It isn’t that a given piece of software isn’t standards compliant. More fundamentally, it’s that the standards are foundationally corrupt, because the entire practice of web development since the late 90’s has been suspect.
At its technological core, the Web (as the hypertext transfer protocol and its myriad markup languages) is an infrastructure designed to serve documents. The term document is purposefully but pointedly vague--it may represent a book, an article, a single word or letter, the dynamically generated output from an input request, a list of items, a series of pictures or movies, et cetera. These things have one binding commonality: they represent the ends of production, the products--they are content. What they are explicitly not are means to production--they are not applications, or workflows, or highly interactive generative whatevers.
Every step the Web has taken toward this idea of documents-as-interfaces, websites-as-applications has been completely wrong. AJAX is an abomination. jQuery is an execration.
Web developers, rich application designers--it’s as if they’re feverishly researching bloodletting in hopes of curing AIDS. As if they’re trying to figure out the best way to build a two-legged chair. The problem is misdirected effort--straight up, you’re doing it wrong.
Nothing about the Web supports these development models. That it is even possible is the unfortunate consequence of insufficiently strict systems architects coupled with insufficiently educated developers. The adage that anyone may publish on the Web is a true one, and a powerful thing. But that power was massive; a growth engine of, by and for the people has no incentive to play by the rules if they aren’t rigidly enforced. And as people built without discipline, and as they shifted their efforts from content to design, the Web, slowly and from within, corrupted itself.
Almost no corner of the Web is today unspoiled. What once might have been a usable index of an artist’s work is rendered (literally, in this case) oblique, opaque, and indecipherable, and consequently ruined. An entire cutesy cottage industry sprung up around the applicationization of the Web, going so far as to leverage an unearned, unjustified and eye-rollingly terrible name for itself. Even the Web’s frontmost icon has advanced this corruption, this idea of the browser-as-everything.
I’m not an idiot. The Web as it exists today isn’t going to revert into what it Should Be, no matter how right I am (and I’m very, very right). The path forward isn’t a Sherman’s March to HTML 1.0; the market demands rich Web-applications (whatever that is) and it will have them on the entrenched technology as it exists.
So, the Web, as it was and should have been, is dead. Let the content-designers continue on their fundamentally idiotic path. Let a thousand CSS Zen Gardens flourish in their ignoble glory. Let Google build its stupid tool-bars and browsers, and continue to worsen its products through its baldly-terrible iterative changes. They all till on dead soil.
What we need is a new understanding of the market. Two new infrastructures designed for two explicit purposes: one, to deliver the means to production; another, to deliver the ends of those means.
For the latter, I envision a strict XML delivery system, with hooks for enhancements of distribution, ease-of-creation, and dynamic generation. Pure content as an end rather than a means; configured for screen, print, or device; simple, above all else, but extensible.
For the former, I envision something akin to a delivered Java, the runtime environment not bound to the system but packaged in a browser/explorer, which could navigate a routed and interlinked network of application-providing servers. A platform not unlike Valve’s Steam but more ubiquitous, more generic. It would bear in mind Java’s failures, and carry the weight of a global consortium behind it--public, private, open- and closed-source benefactors creating a mechanism that can deliver applications to users immediately, with zero configuration and ignorant of that user’s technological capabilities. Scalable, highly available, gracefully falling back to lower levels of support when able, and gracefully failing completely when not. And, most importantly, built to seamlessly publish to the meta-XML content specification we’ve described above as a first priority. The two systems, the means and the ends, co-operate, fundamentally and rigidly aware of each others’ existence. Any attempt by one to duplicate or co-opt functionality already provided, or better provided, by the other must be met with the most insurmountable wall of impossibility.
It’s all a ridiculous pipe dream, of course. I can’t imagine such an idyllic infrastructure into existence. But I can encourage it: let’s all reconsider the assumptions of what we’re doing, at a really core level. Are we choosing the right technology to solve our problems? Are we spending time in the right pursuits? Are we researching and developing meaningfully, or wastefully? Let’s all “Web” less, “design” less, and worry a little bit more about producing information that people can actually, usefully, consume.
The Webless Initiative has some good ideas wrapped in a little bit too much ascetic/puritan rage (accordingly, the associated Anti-web manifesto).
A poorly written/researched article entitled In Praise of Lo Fi nevertheless raises some meaningful thoughts.
Joel Spolsky speaks intelligently about best-practice software architecture and design, though (caveat!) tends to lend too much weight to pragmatism to entirely suit this discussion.
By many measures, 37 signals is the corporate embodiment of the opposite of this philosophy; I can think of almost nothing good about the company, its ethos, its products or its people, and I therefore think it serves as a good example of What Not To Do, a towering beacon from which you may steer your ship violently and ceaselessly away.