The dcurtis Manifesto
Take everything you know about the internet. Now fucking forget it.
The internet is an infant. It's a pile of crap. I'm tempted to call it defective. The W3C is worse than the UN. We need to make progress. We need to push forward. And in order to do that, we need to experiment and search out possibilities for expanding our horizons. We need to step out of the boxes we've sealed around us. There's a world outside the crazy "best practices" created to overcome horrific shortcomings of CSS. We are not confined to the way things are.
When you start to build something new, think about the what could be, the what may be, and the what will be. Don't settle, don't give up, don't get stuck in a box built by other people's misguided interaction paradigms. The internet is open and free, and that means there are no rules.
19 comments
I want to do more without having to shoe horn into the "web standard".
I want to be able to write Ruby, Python, Haskell, or even Erlang in a file and have a browser open it and render it.
Or hell I'd love to just do away with the browser! They're heavy burdens that tend to muck up everything. It took 20 years for us to just get Websocket for god sakes.
What I would like to see -- is a removal of all the coding nonsense that has moved into the web space. I don't have to know how to write my own postscript to make a PDF to send to a printer.
The idea that in this day in age that we can have really strong layout applications that work with a visual paradigm and spit out compliant, accessible, standards-based web sites, it's ludicrous. Web design is still in the dark ages because of our design applications aren't where they should be.
The problem with no rules is that nothing can work.
No rules and you won't have HTTP. You won't have IP. You won't have working computers.
Now, if we move from the abstract to reality - what you're asking is to be free of understanding inconsistencies, to be free of quirks, so you can focus on getting stuff done. You still need rules - you're just not recognising them as rules.
The web sucks. HTML+CSS+JS+browser is not a platform. Anyone who does not realize this simply hasn't had enough experience with actual platforms—either using them or developing for them.
Web design as a genre is a wasteland. In the nineties it was all animated gifs and repeating backgrounds, in early 2000s it was all 12px Verdana and pixel fonts, now it's all gloss and drop shadows and rounded corners. Every cool website which has ever existed has visually fallen right in line with all of the others.
Web applications are an abomination of the concept of a graphical computer program. I'm sick of scrolling down only to have interface elements run off the top of my screen. The fold still exists. If you can't fit it on one screen, it doesn't belong there. I never want to see another dashboard in my life.
HTML5+CSS3+[insert modern Javascript interpreter]+DOM is not the future, it's a stopgap between now and the future. In that future, there won't be three programming languages, each with its own four ways to draw a box or an image or some text on a screen.
Wake me up when markup is dead, when designers are squarely within imaging programs, and programmers are squarely within real programming languages, and someone who understands interface design is telling them both what to do. Until then, I'll keep writing HTTP APIs my iPhone OS programs can talk to.
Unless you have some hated for IANA and IETF.
How would you have interoperability without standards?
Unless of course you just like being at the mercy of a single vendor, we need open standards.
Most of the problems of the web today are due to the market dominance a single vendor playing against standards, implementing standards later than all other open-source web browsers, and most importantly making sure it provides the slowest javascript to make sure that application don't migrate to the web to fast.
So you're barking up at the wrong tree.
Best practices are important (and I can't believe I'm defending the notion; I'm usually railing against the best practice monkeys) because they offer much-needed guidance to less talented web designers and developers. If the web didn't suck so much, there would be no need for it.
Think of it this way: The law is meant to be the floor of our society. Everybody breaks laws now and then (and, indeed, some seem made to be broken), but there should be some sort of order, right? Can we do better? Of course! Does the law tell us how to live a moral, interesting and valuable life? Hell no!
Such are best practices... They're made to be taken under advisement. That's all. If any serious IAs or IxDs out there feel pressured by the tyranny of best practices, they're probably not very good.
I agree, the web is young, fledgling and still has a way to go before we can consider it mature. W3C is kinda messy and cantankerous but, the standards they made built the web that we have.
15 years from now the billions of HTML pages, CSS files and Javascript scripts we have now will still be around. HTTP will still be around, TCP/IP will still be alive and well; data from 15 years ago is still around.
The standard that they built wasn't bad in and of itself, it built upon the tools that they had at hand, SGML, a C-like scripting language and CSS (which is a pretty brilliant idea if you study it's design).
If you say that we should start fresh and built something purposefully for the web now that we know what it is you run into the same problem they had 15 years ago. I have just as little clue as W3C did when they first started.
You say CSS is a mess and should be taken out but, then I say most people don't realize what they are doing with CSS. It's pretty straight forward in that it's built for a browser. It's designed to be flexible, expandable and fit on everything from a cellphone screen to a jumbo-tron and still be able to bring something to each viewing experience.
People want something other than CSS because they want to build fixed, static layouts; posters basically. Yeah, there are things that move or a video or two here and there but, most web design, even celebrated web design is just print aesthetics and paradigms in digital formats.
The web frees us from that. A website can be (and often is) different for every person that visits it. It's a medium that can be broadcast to the masses and yet (hyper)personalized. This is why we have the separate languages, HTML, CSS and JS all for different tiers of interaction.
The standards that W3C made, allow this and yet designers are constantly battling CSS to put the very thing that makes the web different from print fit inside a print box.
We need to step out of that box that has been handed to us (and most of us have been taught in) and create a new visual language. One where we don't fight the differences but, embrace them.
Our messages are going be interpreted, mixed and remixed as we send them. We have lost the power of a rigid, single perspective that is forced on the viewer; we've gained the ability to tailor that message to each person to allow them to interpret it how they see it and most importantly for them to tell us how they hear it and what they think.
We don't work in broadcast anymore. Our tools, like the web we are tasked with designing is interpreted. It's only our thinking that's static.
