Controlling Web Pages
The Sage "... accepts the ebb and flow of things, Nurtures them, but does not own them," Tao Te Ching; 2 Abstraction
Spend some time on web design newgroups or mailing lists, and you'll find some common words and ideas repeated time after time. Question after question, of course, is "how do I?". But beneath questions like "how do I make my pages look the same on every platform" and "how can I make my fonts appear identical on the Macintosh and Windows" is an underlying question - "how do I control the user's browser?" Indeed, the word control turns up with surprising frequency.
Underpinning all this is the belief that designers are controllers (think about the implications of the term "pixel mechanic"). Designers want to override the wishes of users, and the choices that they have made about their viewing experience (by "fixing" font size, for instance). Designers want to second guess platform differences, caused by different logical resolutions (for instance the Macintosh's 72dpi, versus the standard Windows 96dpi). Designers are all knowing, and will not tolerate anything less than a rendering on every browser that is pixel perfect with the rendering on their own machine.
Of course, this exaggerates the case, but not greatly. A very strong example of this is the often expressed disappointment of developers when they learn that style sheets are not "DTP for the web". And if you are a Mac user, you will be acutely aware of just how many really major sites abuse style sheets to make their pages illegible. Chances are they are using pixels or points as a measure of font-size. Underlying this choice is the "designer is controller" philosophy.
Where does this idea come from? I believe it flows from the medium of print. In print the designer is god. An enormous industry has emerged from WYSIWYG, and many of the web's designers are grounded in the beliefs and practices, the ritual of that medium. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page.
Why does it matter?
A newborn is soft and tender, A crone, hard and stiff. Plants and animals, in life, are supple and succulent; In death, withered and dry. So softness and tenderness are attributes of life, And hardness and stiffness, attributes of death. Tao Te Ching; 76 Flexibility
Perhaps the inability to "control" a page is a limitation, a bug of the web. When we come from the WYSIWYG world, our initial instinct is to think so. I admit that it was my first response, and a belief that was a long time in going. But I no longer feel that it is a limitation, I see it as a strength of a new medium.
Let's look at this through the other end of the microscope. The fact we can control a paper page is really a limitation of that medium. You can think - we can fix the size of text - or you can think - the size of text is unalterable. You can think - the dimensions of a page can be controlled - or - the dimensions of a page can't be altered. These are simply facts of the medium.
And they aren't necessarily good facts, especially for the reader. If the reader's eye sight isn't that of a well sighted person, chances are the choice the designer made is too small to comfortably read without some kind of magnification. If the reader is in a confined space, a train to work, an airplane, the broadsheet newspaper is too large. And there is little the reader can do about this.
The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn't have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must "accept the ebb and flow of things". ... >>
1 Same old new medium?
2 Controlling Web Pages
3 Adapatability is Accessibility
4 The Journey
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