Paul Ford’s essay on the Processing language and, more directly, the very nature of web sites, has blown me away.
I’ve been out of the “web development” world for a while now and am more of an “infrastructure guy.” But I always try to keep relatively current with the “gui” scene and what’s happening in the specifications and standards. I’m always up to my ass on “best practices” for the backend, but only dabble in the same when it comes to the structure of basic documents and whatever model is currently in vogue as far as user interface is concerned.
One of the things that got me excited, and eventually turned me bitter, was the whole leap to the “symantic web.” One of the main thoughts circulating around this idea is that documents encoded to the standards (which are not really defined yet) of the “symantic web” would provide leverage in the future. In other words, one could present the same document in innumerable ways using only a single source.
Paul’s essay calls into question the very nature of the “semantic web” as a leveragable platform for the future of the web. Certainly separating presentation from the document itself is the right thing to do, as is isolating your business logic from your presentation.
Coding to the specifications is a good thing, but when the specification are immature and relatively fluid, and most of the tools required to further the growth of the medium are not present, it can get a little tiresome. Just as the table tag was abused during the web’s glory days (so much so that Fireworks contained an “automagic” nested/sliced tables feature), so to are the current specs (div, anyone?) being manipulated for presentation’s sake.
In short, I don’t see why we are better off right now, other than, perhaps, on the text browser front. The current specifications (XHTML) are neither elegant, nor simple. Web development is harder than it has ever been, and the main problem is that nobody has ever decided what a web page even IS yet. It’s difficult to write specifications, even if the goal of the specification is clear. It’s even more tricky to rock a spec when nobody has even figured what it is you’re defining the specifications for. I suppose one could take a structuralist approach and assert that a web page is what it is because the specifications are the structure. The result basically “is what it is” like a one-eyed sailor. But as a great poet once said, “the center cannot hold.” Lacan gets a woody.
But the direction we’re heading in is decent. All we can do is code to the specs and wait for the “next thing.” And if the next thing is a true definition of what a web page is and a format for content that allows for functions such as, in Ford’s terms, “the automatic extraction of a play from a short story,” then that’s a good place to be.
I’ll stop rambling. Read Paul Ford’s essay on the subject and report back to me.
More later.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Brian // Sep 12, 2003 at 12:55 pm
Pretty much everything Mr. Ford writes blows me away. Two thoughts while reading your post.
1) Dont forget how young this industry is. I was recently reminiscing about something that happened four years ago and started to recall the web landscape at that time. I remember the giddiness I felt as all of my friends eventually found their way to e-mail and we could have “virtual” discussions via e-mail just like we used to do back in college while sitting around the bong. We’re so unbelievably young as an industry, it’s laughable.
2) This is the wild west. A lot of really good work is being done by really bright people—for nothing. Just for the sheer thrill of it. It’s like the old west in the way that people are just going out there and seeing what they can build. They are making their own rules and innovating at the same time. If the internet were entirely owned and funded by IBM (shudder), there would be exacting rules and guidelines and a very linear growth, but what’s the fun in that?
Working in the web industry sure does get frustrating at times (anyone wanna hire me?), but I still get a kick out of seeing the faceless thousands show up in the server logs to something I built.
Now, draw, pardner!
2 Elliott // Sep 15, 2003 at 2:14 pm
Reader: the Ford essay is fascinating if unfocused. This response is less focused.
I think the wild west analogy really is a good one. The internet is a space used by a lot of people for a lot of different things. The problem of posting your prom picture, for example, has been essentially solved. Other problems are pretty well in hand: I have no problem buying merchandise online from any number of vendors. In ‘97, I wouldn’t have considered it. Ford wants the abstraction of these cases, and others, to make sense.
While I read Ford’s essay, I was thinking about the wild west analogy, and I kept coming to this question: is the interstate highway system elegant? Mostly, it couldn’t be easier to negotiate, below the surface, its standards (minimum right-of-way size, median requirements, on/off ramp requirements, lane marking requirements, &c.) make it accessible and predictable, and it moves a lot of traffic. To get to what’s left of the wild west, you have to take the interstate to start. To get out of the wild west, you follow something to the interstate.
So what about the internet? Is Ford’s idea of extracting a play from a short story the equivalent of moving a double-wide mobile home from Sioux City to Peoria on a pair of semis? Getting up to the minute baseball updates is as easy as driving the interstates. Buying flowers for overnight delivery is too. It is the concreteness of the problems that makes these solutions readily available.
Now to anyone who takes a lot of snapshots, film snapshots, the problems of content management are familiar: what do you do with these things? Put them in albums, no? It’s a start, but if you have albums sorted cronologically, which is easiest to do, and you want to look at pictures of Michael, or pictures of flowers, you need an index, and an index is hard to build and hard to maintain.
Computers offer a solution to this kind of problem, but it is a lot of work too, because the computer does not know what you are giving it. Directories full of image files are actually more of a nusiance than stacks of unsorted snapshots, unitil you index them, thumbnail them, and write some html pages to show and link them. Well, that’s harder than putting photos in albums, and you still have to get someone to sit at a computer to look at them.
Of course you can automate it, with a little programming, so that, essentially, you don’t have to type the tags in your html, and the format of the data that describes your data is consistent. There is still a considerable amount of data entry to do for each photo to make any of this useful, and you still don’t have an index system. Here, after forty hours of programming and ten hours of data entry, is the kid, in the snow, last January, on an eggshell background, with a field for comments, your comments. Oh, you wnat to see pictures of flowers? Well, maybe there are some in this directory, or this one…
The solution to finding pictures of flowes lies in relational databases, and building a schema, creating categories (flowers, water, the kid, &c.). This is like roadbuilding. Once you decide how you are going to do it, you do it, and it works for you, mostly. If you build your roads to standards (drive on the right side of the road, output in html, &c.) you can hook in to the interstate, or the internet. Then, theoretically, the sky is the limit. Including extracting a play from a short story, maybe.
For me, the most exciting thing about reading literature (about listening to music, too) is the moment of pushing or popping from one level of discourse to another. The internet has a lot of promise in that direction, with its stacks of forward and backward navigation and its hyperlinks. In my opinion, that promise is mostly unmet, and is possibly unmeetable.
I have been transported by someting I read on the internet twice, I think. Once by a chapter from the O’Reilly book about the Linux kernel on the Linux file system and its attendant disk and memory structures, and once by a long plain-text file I found in an unprotected directory on someones website.
As a reader, and end-users of the internet are basically readers, I am concerned with the markup. It is not really separate from the text, and I don’t know what to do with it from a critical perspective. Whatever the form of the new literature, I hope it has a ‘view source’ feature.
Anyway, thanks for pointing out that essay.
3 Anonymous // Jul 18, 2005 at 2:07 am
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