They say AI will replace the web as we know it, and this time they mean it. Here follows a short list of previous times they also meant it, starting way back in 1997.
Inspired by the success of PointCast, a clever application that displayed news headlines as a screensaver, our “Push!” story argued that Web browsers were about to become obsolete.
(I repeat, this was 1997. The Wayback machine was roughly one year old. Primitive CSS was newly available in IE3, but most folks at the time continued to use the Netscape browser, which they bought on disc at their neighborhood computing store.)
Though I dubbed it “the worst story Wired ever published,” I quickly began to get feedback from readers who argued that the predictions in the piece were coming true after all. The inspiring technology this time is RSS, a specification that allows easy syndication of news, blogs, and other frequently updated sources.
There is a clear parallel between the excitement of the PointCast days and the enthusiasm for RSS today, one that goes further than easy harvesting of news headlines. Search engine results, product information, new music, notification of recent blog comments, and many other types of digital information are becoming available through RSS. This dialect of XML brings us the Web as an evolving environment: customizable, variable in intensity, and always on. This is the old promise of push. We can see the potential for radically new types of media – again.
To be fair, whereas the 1997 story made mountains out of an early “push” app, this 2004 second attempt to declare the web dead caught a moment of genuine game change as RSS, Atom, and XML provided dependable web standards (not a lone application, as in the 1997 piece) for syndication.
But syndication, of course, did not kill the web; it brought forward much of its inherent value. All praise to Dave Winer and his confederates for RSS and Atom, and to WaSP member Tim Bray and his colleagues for XML: here’s a contemporary history of how that standard came to be.
You’d think Wired would be tired (see what I did there?) of hyping the end of the platform that gave the magazine its relevance, but no:
Two decades after its inception, the World Wide Web has been eclipsed by Skype, Netflix, peer-to-peer, and a quarter-million other apps.
(Observation: A Wolf wrote or co-wrote the first two articles, and a Woolf co-wrote the third. A meaningless coincidence, but if this were politics instead of tech, there would doubtless be a whole QAnon-style conspiracy theory about it. Especially since Woolf is often a Jewish surname. But I digress.)
The web profoundly changed the world, for better and worse, with the jury still out on some charges, but one thing hasn’t changed: every few years someone in an intellectual leadership position declares the web kaput. It survived previous bubbles (starting with the dot-com crash) and has proved hardy enough to continue providing profound benefits and hazards to the entire world, absorbing and deepening new technologies rather than succumbing to them.
Look, I understand why AI is bigger than Pointcast and how it is disrupting anything it can be stuck in, but the web is not going away. ’Cause think about it for five minutes, which is four and a half minutes longer than the authors of the previous hype cycles appear to have done. If AI kills the web that provides the information AI sucks down, then there is no contemporary body of news and text for AI to suck down and regurgitate. It would be like a parasite that kills the host body. There are occasionally such things in nature, but mostly, life finds a way, mostly. And so will the web. Now a word about those self-driving cars….
Many designers still think in px first when creating baseline styles. But we know intellectually that various relative typography approaches are better suited to our medium in all its complexity. Better for accessibility. Better for avoiding bizarre typographic disasters linked to user preference settings, device limitations, and the unforeseen ways our overwrought styles can interact with one another.
As I contemplate a long-overdue redesign of my own site, it’s worth taking a refreshing dip into what we’ve learned about web typography over the past 20+ years. From the pages of (where else?) A List Apart:
Bojan Mihelac: “Power to the People: Relative Font Sizes” (2004)
An early and simple creative solution for text resizing that respects users’ choices and also gives them an additional option for resizing despite the limitations of some of the most popular browsers of the day. Presented for its historical importance, and not as a how-to for today. https://alistapart.com/article/relafont/
Lawrence Carvalho & Christian Heilmann: “Text-Resize Detection” (2006)
Detect your visitors’ initial font size setting, and find out when they increase or decrease the font size. With this knowledge, you can create a set of stylesheets that adapt your pages to the users’ chosen font sizes, preventing overlapping elements and other usability and design disasters. Presented for its historical importance as an insight into the complex dancing we’ve done in the past to ensure readability. https://alistapart.com/article/fontresizing/
Richard Rutter: “How to Size Text in CSS“ (2007)
Sizing text and line-height in ems, with a percentage specified on the body (and an optional caveat for Safari 2), provides accurate, resizable text across all browsers in common use today. An early move toward more responsive type and away from the accessibility problems created by setting text sizes in px in some browsers and devices. https://alistapart.com/article/howtosizetextincss/
Wilson Miner: Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid
The main principle of the baseline grid is that the bottom of every line of text (the baseline) falls on a vertical grid set in even increments all the way down the page. The magical end result is that all the text on your page lines up across all the columns, creating a harmonious vertical rhythm. https://alistapart.com/article/settingtypeontheweb/
“We must now practice a universal typography that strives to work for everyone. To start, we need to acknowledge that typography is multidimensional, relative to each reader, and unequivocally optional.” https://alistapart.com/article/flexible-typesetting/
Keep going…
For more web design community wisdom and web typography history, see Typography & Web Fonts in A List Apart, for people who make websites.
And in the Comments below, please share your favorite resources for creating websites that look great and read beautifully, no matter what technical and human capabilities get thrown at them.
It’s Sunday; I’m playing with my music collection, content as a fed-and-burped babe. Allow me to explain.
I realized last night that, in tracking my shifting musical tastes via my Last.fm Pro account, I’m basically remaking “Pardon My Icons,” the creative project I launched on this very website in 1995, back when it was still at a tilde address (it did not become zeldman.com until ’96), and which first brought my work to the attention of other creatives who were also discovering the early web and making it their own.
Me, collage, and music
Although I was not serious about it, I started making collage art when I lived in Washington DC in my 20s.
Back then I was serious about composing and producing. I used an Akai 12-track recorder, a rack of synth modules commanded by my Yamaha DX7 with a custom E! card, and a PC running Personal Composer MIDI, arranging, and composition software. I also had an old Selmer Bundy flute, an African reed instrument whose name I forget (and whose “reed” turned out to be a dried locust carcass, as I would discover, to my horror, when the instrument broke), Fender amps, mics, and a variety of percussion instruments with which I made music in my Washington, DC-based recording studio. But that’s a whole ’nother story.
I did not expect to earn a living as a composer, and in that negative expectation I was more than amply fulfilled.
The paper’s arts section editor in those days was named Richard. I’d gotten his attention without soliciting it after creating “Khz” for City Paper. Khz was my weekly music column. I covered the emerging go-go and hardcore scenes, as they were what was happening in DC, and the whole country would soon be listening. Naturally, the Post made me stop writing about that interesting and relevant stuff, and instead paid me $40 per to crank out anodyne concert reviews of mainstream artists like Kenny Rogers when their tours came through DC. (I was comped to the ticket but paid my own travel and gas out of the 40 bucks.)
I typically had 30 minutes from the time the headliner started to call in my review, which meant I had to write it in my head while watching the beginning of the performance, then run to a pay phone booth (kids, ask your parents) and dictate it aloud to someone on the copy desk, before the concert had even begun to build up a head of steam. This wasn’t fair to the artists. I did the best job I could under the circumstances, taking pride in how quickly I could structure and ship a news story. Richard fired me before I could quit, but that, too, is another story.
Most importantly at that time, I lived with a girlfriend. She was an artist and architect who had left that career to study computer programming. We were social (many friends, drinking was often involved), and serious about our art—which, in my case, was music, even if I earned my living writing concert reviews and crafting passable but hardly brilliant ads.
Through all of those ups and downs, and to the side of those major efforts, I kept at the collage for years, putting in several hours a night making the things. When each was finished—and deciding that any art product was finished was damned tough for my restless young mind—I would carefully frame it behind glass, and mount it on the walls of our apartment.
Was it art? Just a hobby? Who knows? It made me happy.
And then gradually, as I put more effort into my music and ad careers, I set the collage-making aside, for a time.
New career in a new town
Ten years later, I was a New York art director and copywriter, two years sober, and no longer in that same romantic relationship. That’s okay, I was in a new one.
I’d packed my music studio equipment—now obsolete because Akai stopped making the proprietary multitrack tape format that their 12-track unit ran on—in a storage unit. Eventually I’d give away all that music and recording equipment (keeping only the multitrack masters), but that, too, is another story.
The client was Warner Bros., the project was “Batman Forever,” our visionary client was Donald Buckley, my partners were Steve McCarron, Alec Pollak, and Doug Rice, and the website was a huge hit, attracting half the people who visited the early web. (Alec’s “Flashback 1995: batmanforever” shares screenshots, which are great, although they cannot convey what a breakthrough the site was in March, 1995.)
With 3 million people using the web in 1995, the site got 1.5 million visits a day for over a year. Not bad.
Pardon my icons (1995)
I immediately set to work creating a personal site (this one), and Pardon My Icons was one of its first “entertainments.”
As is often the case with my creative efforts, I made these tiny, Warhol-inflected bits of art as a protest against what I saw as the mediocrity of the icons in general use on that early, early web.
(Similarly, my friends and I would later start The Web Standards Projectin protest against the dumb ways most folks were being told to create websites, e.g. using proprietary tags instead of W3C and ECMA standards, because browsers didn’t properly support those. Having lost access to my musical master tapes because I’d invested in Akai’s non-standard and eventually discontinued tape format, I was kind of keen on not letting the internet fall victim to the same kind of nonstandard f*ckery. But that, too, is another story. We are gathered here to talk about icons and collage. So let’s do that:)
A mental break
I track my music on Last.fm Pro. Here’s my account. (But don’t look unless you, too, have a Pro account. I’ll explain why in a moment.)
Some of the artists I listen to, as shown on last.fm Pro.
Last.fm lists the artists you play, arranging them by the number of plays. Thus, if you were to play three tracks by Freddie Gibbs and two by Bill Evans, you’d have a collage featuring those two artists, with Freddie preceding Bill because he has one more play than Bill.
But if you play three tracks each of Freddie Gibbs and Bill Evans, then Bill will come first, because Bill comes before Freddie alphabetically.
Through such moves, over time, an ever-shifting collage unfolds. But only in Last.fm Pro.
In regular, free old last.fm, you can see other people’s artists as a list, arranged by number of plays, interrupted by an ugly barrage of ads. This is a useful free service for those who are curious about what their friends listen to. But it is a list, not an artful collage, of course.
Collage for days
In Pro, you can see their artists and yours as an ad-free collage that goes on for pages and pages. Plus, as a Pro user, you can choose which photo represents which artist—and even upload your own. When viewing your collection, you and your visitors will see a collage of your favorite artists, in descending order of plays (and with the English alphabet deciding who at each play count precedes whom), using artwork you not only select, but you can also create and upload to the service.
I like Pro. And even though the product isn’t exactly in what you’d call hyper active development—even though the server isn’t always fast, even though there are a few bugs that will probably never get fixed, even though new features are introduced rarely, and the company’s customer service department isn’t exactly the most active help desk in tech—despite those minor drawbacks, the site does things no other website can do. And at US $3, the Pro account isn’t exactly priced out of reach for most customers. (If you can afford a computer, internet access, a music collection and/or a music streaming service, you can probably scratch the 3 bucks together as well.)
How to collage on last.fm
By controlling what I listen to, and the order in which I listen, I’m slowly building an infinite collage of my evolving musical tastes.
By choosing or finding the artist photos (often post-producing them in Photoshop), I create my mood, my rhythm, and my shifting color palettes.
There are design rules governing where portraits should be placed. For instance, people whose face or gaze points rightward get placed on the left of the grid, so they lead the viewer’s eye from left to right, into the composition, whereas those who gaze to my left belong on the right side, leading the viewer’s eye back in.
To reposition someone, I may listen to a few extra plays of them. Or use last.fm’s Pro Admin to subtract a few plays.
When I started using Last.fm, I merely wanted a visual record of what I was listening to, and when I listened. But as you may have inferred, an accurate count of everything I’ve listened to over the past years is no longer my goal in using last.fm; the goal is now the endless collage.
It’s kinda spiritual.
(Reminder: the only way to see it is to be a Pro member of last.fm, which turns off ads and enables you to view your own and other people’s collections in a grid format instead of a list. If you’re a non-member, you see a list jammed with ads.)
If a tree falls, is it art?
Unlike the real-world collages I made in my 20s (which could be mounted on a wall), and unlike 1995’s “Pardon My Icons” (which could be viewed in any browser connected to the web), my current art-making/hobby activity is not publicly viewable except by last.fm Pro users. And that’s okay. ’Cause I’m not designing this for anyone besides myself to enjoy. I mean, if you see it, cool. But if nobody ever sees it, engaging with it will still make me happy.
Which makes this collage business—what? Therapy? Gaming? (Just of a different sort than anybody else?) A form of stimming? It definitely helps lower my general anxiety, providing a space where I can make pretty pictures while listening to my favorite music, which, driven in part by the desire to expand the collage, is widely inclusive and always expanding.
The hunt for fresh collage material also helps keep me interested in new music. (Readers who feel stuck, take note.) And my collage-making, however unimportant it may be, also provides a needed mental health break during these hellish times.
I do this activity every weekend when my more normal friends are biking or baking or dancing.
Is this activity, into which I’ve now poured many hours of my life, artistry or autism? Who cares? The point is that it’s escapist and harmless and we all need some of that in our lives, however we can grab it.
However you grab your moments of calm, meditation, and happiness, never be ashamed of taking care of yourself.
See also…
Rediscovering music: If Spotify exposes you to new music other people are listening to, Last.fm helps remind you of great music in your existing collection that may have slipped your mind.
For love of pixels: Stroll with us down memory lane as we celebrate the pearl anniversary of pixel art creation’s primary progenitor, and some of the many artists and design languages it inspired.
Blue Beanie Day is everywhere! Here astronaut Bowman from 2001: A Space Oddysey flaunts his basic blue toque, couresty of Kevin Cornell (illustration) and Douglas Vos (inventor of the holiday).
Saturday, 30 November 2024, marks the 17th annual Blue Beanie Day celebration. It’s hard to believe, but web standards fan Douglas Vos conceived of this holiday way back in ’07:
The origin of the name of the holiday is the image of Jeffrey Zeldman on the cover of his book wearing a blue knit cap.[7][8][9] Over the years, the Blue Beanie Day also became an action day for web accessibility, for which the correct use of web standards is a basic requirement.[8] — Wikipedia
How can you join this year’s fun? That’s easy! Snap a self-portrait wearing a blue beanie and post your Blue Beanie Day photo to Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Facebook, your blog (you’ve still got one, right?), and whatevs. Hashtag: #BlueBeanieDay.
I’ve started a Bluesky list featuring some of the brilliant writers, designers, coders, editors, and others who’ve contributed to A List Apart “for people who make websites” from the magazine’s first dawning back in the 19(mumbles). Bluesky fans, grab the list here:
Why only *some* of the contributors? Simple. Several are, sadly, deceased. Many others are likely alive and well but not yet on Bluesky. We can’t unmake death, but we can offer the living networked comradeship and a wee increase in visibility.
So if you’re an A List Apart contributor who’s been thinking of joining Bluesky, consider this an incentive. Note: I’m not a partner in Bluesky, and have nothing to gain from inviting you, beyond the pleasure of your company—be it salty or sweet.
Once you join and have started a profile, ping me and I’ll add you to the list. (I’m zeldman.bsky.social on Bluesky.)
As I study Carrie Bickner’s initial posts on the MARTI Framework she’s developing to manage AI metadata across various disciplines, a familiar feeling steals over me.
It’s similar to how I felt during the early days of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), when a handful of us took on the quarreling browser makers in what seemed a Quixotic attempt to bring consistency, predictability, usability, and accessibility to an already Balkanized web.
Fortunately, at that time, we had two aces up our sleeves: 1., the standards already existed, thanks to the W3C, and 2., the EU and Clinton Administration were suing Microsoft, which meant that the tech press was interested in hearing what we had to say—even if evangelizing web standards had little to do with accusations that Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power.
Once more with feeling: standards from the community
Years after The WaSP declared victory, and browser stagnation had begun to set in, I felt that same thrill vicariously when Eric Meyer, Tantek Çelik, and Matt Mullenweg invented XFN (XHTML Friends Network), inverting the standards creation pyramid so that great ideas were empowered to bubble up from small groups to the wider community, Open Source style, rather than always coming from the top (W3C) down.
I’ve no doubt that microformats were the spark that lit the HTML5 fuse, and we all remember how Steve Jobs used the new markup language to power the first iPhone, initiating the mobile era we now live in.
And now I feel those same stirrings, that same excitement about possibilities, as I study Carrie’s first posts about MARTI, an emerging object-oriented metadata framework that can be used to articulate rights-permissions, preservation metadata, provenance, relationships between objects, levels of AI involvement, and contextual information such as usage history and ethical considerations.
Here’s why I’m excited (and you may be, too).
What do you wanna do tonight, MARTI?
For better or worse, our ideas create our reality. For better or worse, we have atomic power, the web, and social media. There’s no putting these genies back into their bottles. And there’s certainly no shutting down AI, however you may feel about it. Nor need we, as long as we have smart guardrails in place.
I believe that MARTI—particularly as it promotes responsibility, transparency, and integrity in documenting AI’s role in content creation and curation—has the potential to be one of those guardrails.
Drafted by a career digital librarian, this provisional metadata framework for human/generative AI output won’t stop bad actors from scraping content without permission. But if it is extended by our community and embraced by the companies and organizations building AI businesses, MARTI has the potential to bring rigor, logic, and connectedness to the field. In Carrie’s words:
The emergence of generative AI marks a transformative moment in human creativity, problem-solving, and knowledge-sharing. MARTI (Metadata for AI Responsibility, Transparency, and Integrity) is a provisional metadata framework designed to navigate this new landscape, offering a standardized yet adaptable approach to understanding, describing, and guiding the outputs of human-AI collaboration—and even those generated autonomously by AI.
At the heart of MARTI lies a robust object model—a modular structure that organizes metadata into reusable, interoperable components. This model ensures transparency, traceability, and ethical integrity, making it the cornerstone of the MARTI framework.
MARTI is not just an architecture for describing AI output, but it offers a way of structuring policy and a possible foundation for a new literacy. This is not about teaching every individual to code or engineer prompts. It’s about empowering humanity to collectively understand, describe, and guide everything we make with AI, ensuring accountability, transparency, and ethical integrity at every step.
MARTI is a framework for creating structured, standardized documentation that is attached to or embedded in AI-generated content. This documentation, or metadata, can be created by people collaborating with AI tools to produce content. Additionally, AI processes themselves can generate and embed metadata into their outputs, ensuring transparency, traceability, and accountability at every stage of content creation.
Disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine. But then again, so is every other thought leader mentioned in this article (with the exception of the late Steve Jobs, although our lives did touch when he fired me from a project—but that’s another story).
ONE MONTH and 24 years ago, in “Where Have All the Designers Gone?” (my HTMHell design column for Adobe of March 20, 2000), I discussed the deepening rift between aesthetically focused web designers and those primarily concerned with creating good experiences online:
More and more web designers seem less and less interested in web design.
Over the past 18 months or so, many of the best practitioners in the industry seem to have given up on the notion that a low-bandwidth, less than cutting-edge site is worth making. Much of the stuff they’ve been making instead has been beautiful and inspiring. But if top designers wash their hands of the rest of the Web, whose hands will build it, and whose minds will guide it? The possibilities are frightening.
An Imperfect Medium for Perfectionists
Why were many of the leading graphic designers and studios at the time uninterested in web design? For one thing, designers trained to strive for visual perfection found the web’s unpredictability depressing. The article provided clues to the frustrations of the time:
Good designers spend hours tweaking typography in Illustrator and Photoshop. Then visitors with slow connections turn off images.
Of course, where professionals trained in graphic design saw a distressing lack of control, others glimpsed in the infant technology a tremendous potential to help people, pixel-perfection be damned. To reduce the conflict to a cartoon, you might characterize it as David Carson versus Jakob Nielsen—though doing so would trivialize the concerns of both men. Designers already charged with creating websites found themselves somewhere in the middle—barking themselves hoarse reminding clients and managers that pixel-perfect rendering was not a thing on the web, while arguing with developers who told designers the exact same thing.
Visually inspiring websites like K10k showed that the web could, if approached carefully and joyfully, provide aesthetic delight. But many designers (along with organizations like AIGA) were unaware of those sites at the time.
Us and Them
Another source of tension in the medium in 2000 sprang from the discrepancy between the privileged access designers enjoyed—fast connections, up-to-date browsers and operating systems, high-res monitors (at least for the time) offering thousands of colors—versus the slow modems, aging and underpowered computers, outdated browsers, and limited-color monitors through which most people at the time experienced the web.
Which was the real design? The widescreen, multicolor, grid-based experience? Or the 216-color job with pixelated Windows type, a shallow “fold,” and pictures of headline text that took forever to be seen?
To view your masterpiece the way most users experienced it, and at the syrup-slow speed with which they experienced it, was to have an awakening or a nightmare—depending on your empathy quotient. Some designers began to take usability, accessibility, and performance seriously as part of their jobs; others fled for the predictability of more settled media (such as print).
A New (Old) Hope
My March, 2000 article ended on an upbeat note—and a gentle call to action:
For content sites to attain the credibility and usefulness of print magazines; for entertainment sites to truly entertain; for commerce sites and Web-based applications to function aesthetically as well as technically, the gifts of talented people are needed. We hope to see you among them.
That was my hope in 2000, and, all these years later, it remains my vision for this web of ours. For though the browsers, connections, and hardware have changed substantially over the past 24 years, and though the medium and its practitioners have, to a significant extent, grown the Hell up, beneath the surface, in 2024, many of these same attitudes and conflicts persist. We can do better.
Minus the framesets that formerly contained it, you may read the original text (complete with archaic instructions about 4.0 browsers and JavaScript that broke my heart, but which Adobe’s editors and producers insisted on posting) courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
So, I’m a web designer. And I also specialise in accessibility, design systems, and design.
…Why do I think that this is the best title? Here’s why.
I’m designing for the web. The infinitely flexible web. The web that doesn’t have one screen size, one browser, one operating system, or one device. The web that can be used by anyone, anywhere, on any internet connection, on any device, on any operating system, on any browser, with any screen size. I’m designing with the web. Using the web platform (HTML, CSS, JS, ARIA, etc.), not a bloated harmful abstraction. I have a deep understanding of HTML and its semantics. I love CSS, I know how and when to utilise its many features, and I keep up-to-date as more are added. I have a strong understanding of modern JavaScript and most importantly I know when not to use it.
The Wax and the Wane of the Web (2024): Forget death and taxes. The only certainty on the web is change. Ste Grainer takes a brief look at the history of the web and how it has been constantly reinvented. Then he explores where we are now, and how we can shape the future of the web for the better. – A List Apart
The Cult of the Complex (2018): If we wish to get back to the business of quietly improving people’s lives, one thoughtful interaction at a time, we must rid ourselves of the cult of the complex. Admitting the problem is the first step in solving it. – A List Apart
Dear AIGA, where are the web designers? (2007): For all the brand directors, creative directors, Jungian analysts, and print designers, one rather significant specimen of the profession is missing. – zeldman.com
Standardization and the Open Web (2015): How do web standards become, well, standard? Although they’re often formalized through official standards-making organizations, they can also emerge through popular practice among the developer community. If both sides don’t work together, we risk delaying implementation, stifling creativity, and losing ground to politics and paralysis. Jory Burson sheds light on the historical underpinnings of web standardization processes—and what that means for the future of the open web. – A List Apart
What’s widely used, no longer particularly effective, and makes web content inaccessible to many people with disabilities? It’s our old friend CAPTCHA! In a group note dated 16 December 2021, the W3C explains how CAPTCHA excludes disabled users, and suggests alternatives which may be kinder and more reliable:
Various approaches have been employed over many years to distinguish human users of web sites from robots. The traditional CAPTCHA approach asking users to identify obscured text in an image remains common, but other approaches have emerged. All interactive approaches require users to perform a task believed to be relatively easy for humans but difficult for robots. Unfortunately the very nature of the interactive task inherently excludes many people with disabilities, resulting in a denial of service to these users. Research findings also indicate that many popular CAPTCHA techniques are no longer particularly effective or secure, further complicating the challenge of providing services secured from robotic intrusion yet accessible to people with disabilities. This document examines a number of approaches that allow systems to test for human users and the extent to which these approaches adequately accommodate people with disabilities, including recent non-interactive and tokenized approaches. We have grouped these approaches by two category classifications: Stand-Alone Approaches that can be deployed on a web host without engaging the services of unrelated third parties and Multi-Party Approaches that engage the services of an unrelated third party.
5 years ago, when the web turned 30, I called out some of the dysfunction caused by the web being dominated by the self-interest of several corporations that have eroded the web’s values and led to breakdown and harm. Now, 5 years on as we arrive at the Web’s 35th Birthday, the rapid advancement of AI has exacerbated these concerns, proving that issues on the web are not isolated but rather deeply intertwined with emerging technologies.
There are two clear, connected issues to address. The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned. This has segmented the web, with a fight to keep users hooked on one platform to optimise profit through the passive observation of content. This exploitative business model is particularly grave in this year of elections that could unravel political turmoil. Compounding this issue is the second, the personal data market that has exploited people’s time and data with the creation of deep profiles that allow for targeted advertising and ultimately control over the information people are fed.
How has this happened? Leadership, hindered by a lack of diversity, has steered away from a tool for public good and one that is instead subject to capitalist forces resulting in monopolisation. Governance, which should correct for this, has failed to do so, with regulatory measures being outstripped by the rapid development of innovation, leading to a widening gap between technological advancements and effective oversight.
The future hinges on our ability to both reform the current system and create a new one that genuinely serves the best interests of humanity.
Who will design the next generation of readable, writerly web layouts?
Layouts for sites that are mostly writing. Designed by people who love writing. Where text can be engaging even if it isn’t offset by art or photography. Where text is the point.
With well considered flexible typesetting, modular scaling, and readablemeasures across a full range of proportions and devices. With optional small details that make reading screens of text a pleasure instead of a chore. With type sizes that are easy to read without needing to zoom in. And with a range of interesting sans and serif fonts (including variable fonts) that support reading and encourage creative exploration where headlines are concerned.
So what comes next? For writers, one hopes that what’s next is a fresh crop of small, innovative advancements. Improvements that are felt by readers, even when they aren’t always consciously noticed. Layouts that are not merely legible, but actually feel inevitable, at all sizes and in all contexts.
Beyond outside the box
Services like Typetura may point the way. A marriage of type and tech, Typetura is different from other typesetting methods. An intrinsic typography technology, it “enables you to design with more flexibility, while dramatically reducing code.” Disclaimer: I’m friends with, and have long admired the work of, Typetura founder Scott Kellum. Designing With Web Standards readers will recognize his name from the Kellum Image Replacement days of the early 2000s, but that ain’t the half of what he has done for web design, e.g. inventing dynamic typographic systems, high impact ad formats, new parallax techniques, and fluid typesetting technology. Scott was also the coder, along with Filipe Fortes, of Roger Black’s late, lamented Treesaver technology. But I digress.
The tech is not the point—except in so far as it improves our ability to think beyond our current understanding of what design and layout means. Just as Gutenberg’s printing press was not the point, but it was the point of departure. Initially, the invention of movable type reproduced the writing we already knew (i.e. the King James Bible). But ultimately, by freeing writing and reading from narrow elite circles and bringing it to more (and more diverse) minds, Gutenberg’s invention transformed what writing was and could be—from the invention of newspapers to the fiction of Virginia Woolf to multimedia experiences, and perhaps even to the web.
Let us all to play with Jen Simmons’s intrinsic web layout ideas and Scott Kellum and partners’s Typetura. While we also sketchin pencil and spend time looking at well designed books —printed, bound ones as well as digital publications in various devices. And specifically, not just fabulous coffee table books, but books that you’ve reread over and over, to understand what, beyond the text itself, encourages that reading response. So that, together, we may take the experiences of both reading and writing to the next level.
Appendix: Resources
If you’re new to the interplay between design and code on the open web, or if you just want a refresher, here are some evergreen links for your further learning and pleasure:
You may not know his name, but he played a huge part in creating the web you take for granted today.
As the first person to realize, way back in 1994, that the emerging web could be a playground, he created Cool Site of the Day as a single-focused blog dedicated to surfacing interesting sites, thereby demonstrating the web’s potential while creating its first viral content. (As an example, traffic from his followers, or, as we called them back then, readers, brought NASA’s web server to its knees.)
He co-founded The Web Standards Project, which succeeded in bringing standards to our browsers at a time when browser makers saw the web as a software market to be dominated, and not a precious commons to be nurtured.
He anticipated responsive web design by more than 20 years with his formulation of Liquid, Ice, and Jello as the three possible ways a designer could negotiate the need for meaningful layout vis-a-vis the unknowns of the user’s browsing environment.
He taught the web DHTML through his educational Project Cool Site.
And then, like a handful of other vital contributors to the early web (e.g. Todd Fahrner and Dean Allen), he vanished from the scene he’d played so large a role in creating.
He’s ba-ack
Glenn Davis wasn’t always missed. Like many other creators of culture, he is autistic and can be abrasive and socially unclueful without realizing it. Before he was diagnosed, some people said Glenn was an a**hole—and some no doubt still will say that. I think of him as too big for any room that would have him. And I’m talking about him here because he is talking about himself (and the history of the early web) on his new website, Verevolf.
If you go there, start with the introduction, and, if it speaks to you, read his stories and consider sharing your own. That’s how we did it in the early days, and it’s still a fine way to do it—maybe even the best way.
I knew Glenn, I worked with him and a lot of other talented people on The Web Standards Project (you’re welcome!), and it’s my opinion that—if you’re interested in how the web got to be the web, or if you were around at the time and are curious about a fellow survivor—you might enjoy yourself.
Screenshot of slide highlighting the four phases of WordPress Gutenberg.
Not only are we enabling folks to express themselves uniquely on the web, unlike the cookie cutter looks that all the social sites try to put you into. We’re doing it in a way which is standards-based, interoperable, based on open source, and increases the amount of freedom on the web.
Blue Beanie Day in support of web standards is celebrated around the world on November 30. Hey, that’s today.
So how can you help? Glad you asked! Take a self-portrait wearing a blue beanie (toque, tuque, cap) and post it to your website and social media channels with the hashtag #BlueBeanieDay.
And for that extra extra, slap a blue beanie on your web and social media avatars, as well.
Do this on November 30 as a reminder to design accessible, web-standards-based websites 365 days a year. Thank you. Love you.
Our static tools and linear workflows aren’t the right fit for the flexible, diverse reality of today’s Web. Making prototyping a central element of your workflows will radically change how you approach problem solution and save you a lot of headaches – and money. But most importantly, you will be creating the right products and features in a way that resonates with the true nature of the Web. A discourse on processes, flexibility, the Web as a material, and how we build things.
