Stuff in my head

Check your calendar

When I started making websites back in 1995 the only way to make a “web page” was with a text editor and markup.

I was studying publishing at the time and was more versed in putting together magazine and newspaper layouts using Quark. Not being from a computing background I liked the fact that Quark’s mental model matched pretty well with how you’d go about putting a page together if you were doing it with bits of paper and sticky tape. There was a “page” you put things on it and moved them around. What you saw on screen was a pretty good approximation of what you’d actually get when it got into print.

Building websites was a bit different. Back then we actually designed in the browser because we didn’t really know any different. We made changes to markup, refreshed the browser, decided it was ok or not, changed things and so on… The disconnect made the design process an ongoing stack of changes. Pushing things around until we were happy. 

It meant we learnt markup pretty fast - which is a good thing. But the whole time I couldn’t help thinking - Jeez why can’t this be as easy as Quark? Hand rolling everything felt like the digital equivalent of setting a letterpress - manually building up a layout and content through markup. 

So naturally things came along that tried to make that happen. Visual, WYSIWYG tools that tried to generate markup from a visual representation of a ‘page’. To an extent they worked, but they generated some pretty hideous markup. Now, this may sound controversial but sometimes that’s ok… When it’s not ok is when that hideous markup started breaking things. It became impossible to maintain and changes were like playing Jenga - never knowing which extra element was the thing holding the whole thing together.

So despite the tantalising promise they offered - tools fell out of favour and were spurned by the industry. Web standards blossomed and boy did they make our lives easier and of course in turn made the web a better, more accessible, valuable tool. But still we were stuck in a world of text editors, and also with the added bonus of a new breed of fire-breathing standards zealots. I can say this because I was one of them.  We became slavish about ‘pure’ markup, we sneered at sloppy semantics and lets face it we turned into snobs.

It’s too easy to stay stuck in the way things are sometimes. I love writing markup. I get a sad little buzz when I solve a layout or presentational problem with CSS but deep deep down I know that this is not the best way.

I understand there’s a fear that if we stop making websites by hand that somehow the quality will slip - the craft will die. I kinda felt the same way, but then I realised that actually when you stop and think about it - typing letters and characters in the right order isn’t really a craft is it? Calligraphy is a craft, whittling a canoe from a log is a craft…

Sticking some tags around some text really isn’t. 

My point is this. It’s 2011, we’re using archaic techniques to design and build websites. Our processes are a mess and yet we seem reluctant to fix things. When Adobe released Muse earlier this week, the web community turned ugly. The snobbery was pitiful. Instead of saying “hey nice work dudes, thanks for having a go at making things better” peoples first reaction was to pop the hood and have a good laugh at the spaghetti markup it generated. That’s kinda sad - for a lot of people who really have no cause to care about markup, Muse will be a godsend. They’ll be able to design a web page as easily as they can create a flyer in Word. How can that be a bad thing?

I’d love for a proper tool to break through and shake things up so we can actually design sites - not as pictures of websites but with all the properties of the medium we’re designing for. It’s really not rocket science, and look to the print publishing industry if you’re scared about how things could turn out. Quark and Indesign came along and no-one was maimed - why should our industry be any different?