Web Design's Long First Decade: A Micro-Meta-History
2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Web Data Mining and Analysis
ResumoThe World Wide Web as a medium and Web design as a creative practice are now both old enough to have histories. The period between 2003 and 2005 saw various public celebrations of the first ten years of this quintessential new medium. But, when my turn to participate arrived at the first international symposium on the history of Web design, I began to think about revisionism at the very moment of historicizing. (1) By all rights, a history of Web design ought to run from the medium's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, to a hot designer of the moment--Joshua Davis from the United States, Yugo Nakamura from Japan, or a collective like Paris-based LeCielEstBleu--in other words, from the first screen shot of the Berners-Lee browser to a selection from Davis's Praystation. Signposts along the way would include the Web's movement out of academic communities and explosion into the public's consciousness when venture capitalists financed the development of the Netscape browser. Detours would lead through the perverse fun of the Webbys, a celebration of Web design that exploded from a small-scale lampoon of the Oscars in the back of a bar to a full scale media extravaganza that rivaled the Oscars five years later. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A history of Web design would have to discuss everything from the information overload of the original Yahoo homepage to the design degree zero of Google, from the net.artists at jodi.org to the dot.commers at a firm like Razorfish, from 256K twisted copper to wireless broadband, from primitive gifs to complex animations. Detailed histories of the evolution of the medium would follow Berners-Lee's development of the Web as a means to distribute physics papers at the Swiss research laboratory CERN, through the release of the first alpha version of the NCSA Mosaic browser for X-Windows in '93, and then on to the frenzy around the spinning off of Mosaic's development team, lead by Marc Andreessen, to form Netscape in 1994. They would discuss the browser wars; the successive releases of HTML, XML and XHTML; the move from static page design and tables to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS); the often invisible but no less crucial design features that enhanced searchability and ranking; server sided scripting that added acronyms like PHP, ASP, and JSP to the lexicon; debates over liquid versus fixed layout schemas; and that perennial favorite, the use and abuse of Flash; and the nascent origins of Web 2.0. [GRAPHIC OMITTED] THE OLD NEW ECONOMY All of the above and much more did indeed characterize the first decade of Web design, but that particular trajectory does not much interest me. I posit that the bounding figures are not programmers like Marc Andreessen, who formed Netscape in 1994, and designers like Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, but rather Mikhail Gorbachev and Osama bin Laden, and that we are talking about a long decade, the twelve years from 1989 to 2001. (2) Remember that Al-Qaeda was forged in the battles against Soviet troops, and that those same battles contributed to the bankrupting and breakup of the USSR. It was their respective actions such as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and plotting the destruction of the Twin Towers that delineate the long first decade of Web design. One might object that the decade under discussion begins in 1994, when the Web moved from text-only to incorporating images (roughly from Netscape to now). I argue for a first decade that is twelve years long, beginning in 1989, the year that Berners-Lee first circulated his paper Information Management: A Proposal, which derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system. (3) While it took him a few more years to launch the World Wide Web, this 1989 paper was the medium's foundation. The post-'89 period contained a multitude of features, but one unifying construct was the belief that after the fall of the Wall, and then the Soviet Union itself, not just communism, but all other countervailing forces against market capitalism were vanquished. …
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