Web burn
This morning I followed a link to a qualified rant about how poor the W3C has become at paying attention to its hinterland of developers. That led neatly to Bert Bos' article about the design principles of W3C web technologies. That led to Microformats. That led to some thinking about the nature of 'web 2.0': about how it is the developer/user attitude that is at 2.0, not the web (which is of course stateless :-).
Mercifully I got on with some actual work after that, as things had become much too ruminative.
But in an hour or so I was back at it, with an idea about interfaces that would transcend the boring tabs and sidebars that are the hallmark of so many sites and put the content 'front and centre' (as it was at the beginning of the web, but my thinking was not motivated by nostalgia). I was thinking about the interplay between tab-and-column interfaces and the sites that are 'underneath' them: currently the things that are 'modal' (edit/view), the things that are 'structure-navigational' (section 1, section 2, section n, subsection4...) and the things that are interactive (upload photo, delete mail..) don't have a common web-wide interface vocabulary (some of them are sometimes expressed as actions that generate their own windows, so it goes a little beyond visual design), and I was wondering whether having such a thing would be helpful in the long run. I was thinking specifically about one component, navigation, and a way to remove navigation from the static layout altogether.
Anyway, so I got drawn back into 'philosophical' thinking; exciting stuff that can up the pulse-rate and give a temporary high: what if this is the next big thing?? More realistically, who is talking about this and doing it already - or doing something better? Must find out. Short term, I shoved the ideas to one side by marking them down as a restatement of things that if I cared to keep a closer eye on the discussions going on in the web developer community, and had an eye on what information architects were doing on trendy new social software sites, I'd have seen implemented months or years ago.
But that still left a residue of misplaced zeal, and soon I was trying to build a prototype for my new interface idea with a bit of (poor) javascript. Well, to write javascript you need to know what you can write and how to write it. And my knowledge of javascript is pretty restricted. So off I went, googling for the kinds of things I wanted to do within my script. And lo and behold, the search terms I submitted were a little off-beam, and I found interesting articles about how to add elements with content into the DOM, and how to read user-selected text in a page. Which started me off thinking about in-browser structured text editing.
So my head was once again filled with ideas about how software that allows the user to write and then format as xhtml (using a GUI) might work. And what kinds of problems might come up. Soon the poor old brain was breathlessly pondering the possibility of making a simple prototype...
I'm sure this is a known geek phenomenon, this overload of novel ideas brought on by just a tiny bit too much time online, but I'm going to call it 'web burn'; if this is not a neologism then just let me know. Doubtless it's bad for the health.
Mercifully I got on with some actual work after that, as things had become much too ruminative.
But in an hour or so I was back at it, with an idea about interfaces that would transcend the boring tabs and sidebars that are the hallmark of so many sites and put the content 'front and centre' (as it was at the beginning of the web, but my thinking was not motivated by nostalgia). I was thinking about the interplay between tab-and-column interfaces and the sites that are 'underneath' them: currently the things that are 'modal' (edit/view), the things that are 'structure-navigational' (section 1, section 2, section n, subsection4...) and the things that are interactive (upload photo, delete mail..) don't have a common web-wide interface vocabulary (some of them are sometimes expressed as actions that generate their own windows, so it goes a little beyond visual design), and I was wondering whether having such a thing would be helpful in the long run. I was thinking specifically about one component, navigation, and a way to remove navigation from the static layout altogether.
Anyway, so I got drawn back into 'philosophical' thinking; exciting stuff that can up the pulse-rate and give a temporary high: what if this is the next big thing?? More realistically, who is talking about this and doing it already - or doing something better? Must find out. Short term, I shoved the ideas to one side by marking them down as a restatement of things that if I cared to keep a closer eye on the discussions going on in the web developer community, and had an eye on what information architects were doing on trendy new social software sites, I'd have seen implemented months or years ago.
But that still left a residue of misplaced zeal, and soon I was trying to build a prototype for my new interface idea with a bit of (poor) javascript. Well, to write javascript you need to know what you can write and how to write it. And my knowledge of javascript is pretty restricted. So off I went, googling for the kinds of things I wanted to do within my script. And lo and behold, the search terms I submitted were a little off-beam, and I found interesting articles about how to add elements with content into the DOM, and how to read user-selected text in a page. Which started me off thinking about in-browser structured text editing.
So my head was once again filled with ideas about how software that allows the user to write and then format as xhtml (using a GUI) might work. And what kinds of problems might come up. Soon the poor old brain was breathlessly pondering the possibility of making a simple prototype...
I'm sure this is a known geek phenomenon, this overload of novel ideas brought on by just a tiny bit too much time online, but I'm going to call it 'web burn'; if this is not a neologism then just let me know. Doubtless it's bad for the health.
posted by Ben Weiner at 1:04 PM
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