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A Dao of Web Design

Introduction

What Zen was to the 70's (most famously with motorcycle maintenance), the Tao Te Ching was to the 90's. From Piglet and Pooh to Physics and back, many have sought sense in applying the Tao Te Ching to something (the Tao of Physics), or something to the Tao Te Ching (the Tao of Pooh). It can be a cheap trick, but lately it has struck me that there is more than a little to be understood about web design by looking through the prism of the Tao.

Daoism is a philosophy, like Buddhism, a way of living, of being in the world, which stems from a text of great antiquity, the Tao Te Ching, whose 81 "chapters" enigmatically sweep across human experience, but with a strong common theme, that of harmony.

For the last couple of years, for better or worse, my life has revolved more than a little around style sheets. I write software, tutorials, and guides for them; I've answered too many questions to count about them on newsgroups and via email; I've fought for their adoption with The Web Standards Project. And slowly I've come to understand web design entirely differently because of them, and to see a strong association between design and the Tao.

What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It's the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it's time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.

Same old new medium?

"Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
So ritual enthralls generation after generation."
Tao Te Ching; 38 Ritual

If you've never watched early television programs, it's instructive viewing. Television was at that time often referred to as "radio with pictures", and that's a pretty accurate description. Much of television followed the format of popular radio at that time. Indeed programs like the Tonight Show, with its variants found on virtually every channel in the world (featuring a band, the talk to the camera host, and seated guests), or the news, with the suited sober news reader, remain as traces of the medium television grew out of. A palimpsest of media past.

Think too of the first music videos (a few of us might be at least that old). Essentially the band miming themselves playing a song. Riveting.

When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, "ritual", and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don't make sense.

If you ever get the chance to watch early television drama you'll find a strong example of this. Because radio required a voice-over to describe what listeners couldn't see, early television drama often featured a voice over, describing what viewers could. It's a simple but striking example of what happens when a new medium develops out of an existing one.

The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang. "Killer Web Sites" are usually those which tame the wildness of the web, constraining pages as if they were made of paper - Desktop Publishing for the Web. This conservatism is natural, "closely held beliefs are not easily released", but it is time to move on, to embrace the web as its own medium. It's time to throw out the rituals of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature.

This is not for a moment to say we should abandon the wisdom of hundreds of years of printing and thousands of years of writing. But we need to understand which of these lessons are appropriate for the web, and which mere rituals. ... >>

1 Same old new medium?
2 Controlling Web Pages
3 Adapatability is Accessibility
4 The Journey

 

 
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"What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It's the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web."

Related ALA Stories:
» Flash Access: Unclear on the Concept
» Access: Everybody Wins
» Accessibility: The Clock is Ticking

 

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