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Chapter 1: Envisioning a Site That Won't Be Featured In suck.com![]() |
An alternative formulation of this question is "How can I design a site that won't be featured at http://suck.com?"
In this book, I'll cover two broad categories of Web sites. The first is Web Publishing. These are sites that are vaguely magazine-like and include, as a degenerate case, the typical corporate product catalog site. The second broad category is Web-based Service. These are sites that do a job for a user, e.g., a site that keeps a dog's medical record and sends out email reminders when the dog needs immunizations. The first category is older and more familiar so let's talk about Web Publishing first.
Start by putting yourself in your users' shoes. Why are they coming to your site? If you look at some Web sites, you'd presume that the answer is "User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes." Academic computer scientists refer to this process of fitting software systems to people as "user modeling."
Slightly more content-rich sites are based on the user model of "User wants to look at product brochures" or "User wants to look at fancy graphics." After pulling the server logs for the sites that reflect these user models, though, it is tough to have much faith in them.
Think about it for a minute: If a user wanted a flashing computer screen and confusing user interface, he could stuff a CD-ROM into the drive. He could get an even more enticing show without the crummy user interface by picking up his television remote control and flipping channels. If a user wanted product brochures, he could get them by calling manufacturers or visiting shops. If a user wanted fancy graphics, he could flip through dozens of pages' worth in a print magazine in the amount of time it would take to load a single corporate Web page.
Users come to magazine-like Web sites because they have questions. They are not bored losers. We are not doing them a favor by putting product brochures online or showing them huge logo GIFs. Users are doing us a favor by visiting our Web sites. They are paying to visit our servers, if not exactly with money then at least with their time. We have to give them something of value or they will never come back.
Ever.
If you can anticipate user questions and make sure that your site answers them, then you will be a successful Web publisher.
Imagine that a friend of yours is at a party talking to Dale, a beautiful member of whatever sex you happen to fancy. Your friend is describing your charity, great humanity, and kindness to animals. Dale, however, won't agree to meet you without seeing a photo first. So you'd better hope that there is a portrait of you somewhere on your home page before Dale and your friend stroll over to the WebTV.
Or imagine that you've given an interview to a reporter on deadline. It is 2:00 am when the reporter realizes he forgot to ask you for some background biographical information. You'll be getting a wake-up call unless you remembered to put a copy of your resume online.
At this point, some people might object that this information is too, well, personal for a personal home page. The Internet frightens them. Sure, their phone number is listed, and the price they paid for their house is public information. And their credit record is open to almost anyone who cares. But they think that if their name is known to an Internet search engine, suddenly all of the privacy that they supposedly formerly had will evaporate. Well, my home phone number has been available via the Internet for 20 years, and my personal site gets about 20,000 visitors a day. I include a picture of myself naked with my old dog George and maps to my house and office on my site. And just as I typed that last period, sitting in what I thought was the privacy of my own home, someone I didn't know called me up. At 8:20 p.m. on a Monday. Would I make a donation to the March of Dimes?
Probably about 1 percent of my unsolicited phone calls are from readers of my Web site. Surprisingly enough, people who find me on the Internet seem to send e-mail instead. Go figure.
"What makes an effective personal home page?" is a different question from "Why put effort into a personal Web site?" I can answer the latter question for myself. I've been immersed in the MIT programming culture since 1976. One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat one's mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s. Thus, we share our source code with others in the hopes that programmers overall can make more progress by building on each other's works than by trying blindly to replicate what was done decades ago. If I learn something about the publishing industry, about cameras, about computers, or about life, I want to share it with as many people as possible so that they can benefit from my experience. Wasting time isn't wasteful anymore if you can write it up and keep other people from wasting time.
Someone with a broken camera will want to know how to get it fixed and how much it will cost. They'll be looking for maps to service centers, warranty details, and prices for out-of-warranty repairs. The site is a natural focal point for customers to meet, interact, and share experiences with each other. So www.nikon.co.jp should have moderated Q&A forums, bulletin boards, and classified ads where customers can contribute.
The preceding advice sounds trivial but try to find a product manufacturer who is following it. If you visit the average company's Web site, you find lots of advertising to potential customers but virtually no services or documentation for existing customers. In this sense the Web is kind of like early television. People didn't understand the new medium so they stuck a camera at the back of a live theater, recorded the movements and speech of the actors, and broadcast the result. On the Internet, companies have produced Web sites by sticking a camera in front of their marketing and sales brochures.
As of August 1998, www.nikon.co.jp was amply stocked with advertising. If you were at an Internet café and needed to review the instruction manual for your Nikon camera, you'd find instructions for going to the post office, purchasing six International Reply Coupons, and mailing them to Japan. Upon receipt of the coupons, Nikon would mail you the relevant manual. There were no tools for collaboration among customers, but you could send Nikon email. However, they asked you to first read the following disclaimer:
Nikon Corporation (" Nikon ") has no obligation for monitoring any ideas, concepts, suggestions or comments (hereafter collectively called " Ideas " ) you transmit to this Site (" the Site ") by electronic mail or otherwise. Nikon understand that you abandon all rights regarding the Ideas at the time when you transmit the Ideas to Nikon, and Nikon has no obligations to keep the Ideas confidential. Nikon has no responsibility for any problems or issues resulted from the Ideas.
For a glimpse of what a corporate site looks like when a company
thinks about existing customers, look at
www.ge.com.
They have advertisements, yes, but also
owner's manuals and installation guides for every GE product. If you
moved into an apartment with a GE appliance but the previous tenants did
not leave you the instructions, you can grab a PDF file from the GE site
and print it.
All of a software vendor's documentation must be online and current. Demonstration programs, ideally running on the server or as Java applets, should be available. Customers ought to be able to purchase and download everything that is for sale. If a software company can't use the Internet effectively, then why would anyone believe that it was capable of doing anything with computers effectively?
Compare the Web sites for AOLserver (www.aolserver.com) and Oracle (www.oracle.com). Since 1995, you could go to the AOLserver site and learn how to program in Tcl, learn how to build a Web site in Tcl with their particular set of API calls, download the latest version of the software, get the installation instructions for 10 different operating systems, and find pointers to applications built on top of AOLserver and developer discussion groups. They had one full-time documentation person on staff.
By contrast, visiting Oracle's site on July 29, 1998 I find Oracle's announcements of a product that I can buy next year (the Oracle RDBMS on Linux), reports of Oracle Applications winning "ERP/MRP Product of the Year" from Managing Automation magazine, and a bunch of articles about how other people love Oracle products. Yet a person who'd already purchased Oracle's core relational database management system could not use www.oracle.com to learn how to install the software or how to write programs using Oracle's version of the SQL language. The product has been on the market for 20 years, the documentation was available a couple of years ago in HTML format on a CD-ROM and yet folks at Oracle are only now thinking about possibly parking it on the Web site for open public access.
My comments?
It would be a nice 20-page site that would cost about $100,000 a year to maintain because every change would have to go up and down this four-level management chain. Assuming we had the budget to do it, I could only see one little problem.
"What's the problem?" asked the PR folks.
"If you walked out of this building and spent the rest of your life searching the planet, I don't think you'd find a single person who cared about the names of the groups at LCS or who was running them."
My suggestion was first to think about Jane Nerd, a computer science undergraduate at the University of Michigan. She is interested in network protocols. She should be able to type "network protocols" into a search box and learn something interesting about the history, practice, and future of computer networks. In the process she would probably discover that our very own Dave Clark was Chief Protocol Architect for the Internet from 1981 to 1989 and that the Advanced Network Architecture Group at LCS is tackling the problem of making one Internet protocol work simultaneously for real-time control, video conferencing and other forms of interactive collaboration, plus traditional data transfer. If she is curious about encryption, she should find the Internet's best tutorial on the workings of the RSA algorithm. In the process, she might learn that LCS employs Ronald Rivest, the "R" in RSA and that Ron is part of the Theory of Computation Group.
Next we should think about Joe Maxinerd, finishing his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. Joe's thesis is on computer graphics. He should have been visiting one of our Web servers every day or two because we are operating a community Web site where the world's leading experts in graphics algorithms meet to exchange research results, talk about new ideas, and teach students. As a participant in forums and from reading comments on research papers, he would be intimately familiar with all the MIT LCS folks who work in the Computer Graphics Group.
We should think about teaching. A quick review of our server logs will reveal that the entire world doesn't come here every day desperate to find out what we're doing. If we want traffic, we'll have to give something back to the Internet. Fundamentally, there are two ways of teaching a scientific or technical subject. The standard textbook takes the "here's the way it is" approach. You don't learn about how people struggled to understand electric and magnetic fields over 2500 years; you get Maxwell's equations. It doesn't have to be this way. At St. John's College (www.sjca.edu), students learn physics by reading original writings by Aristotle, Newton, Kepler, Maxwell, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Millikan.
Nearly all computer science tutorials take the "here's how you do it" approach. With such a short history behind the field and instructors who tend to be ignorant of that history, colleges generally just show students a point-in-time snapshot of thinking about computing. LCS is 35 years old this year, so we're one of the few institutions that has been around long enough to talk credibly about the history of the field.
What would make a great LCS site is a collaboratively produced, collaboratively taught history of computer science. Journalists, historians, and other casual users might wish to read the timeline of technological advances and click through to see explanations of what each advance brought in terms of applications. Thus, for example an entry on early bitmap displays (Stanford, Knight TV, Xerox PARC) would be linked to an explanation of how they led to the MIT Lisp Machine, the Macintosh and then Microsoft Windows. Computer science students would be able to learn all of computer science by following hyperlinks from the timeline to original papers and software. In doing so, they would note that much of the innovation in computer science happened at MIT and perhaps become inspired to apply for positions here.
Because we would farm out responsibility for each section of the timeline to a professor and the responsibility for running community sites in research areas to the various groups, the overall cost of this kind of site would probably be similar to that of the 20-page site produced with a four-level management hierarchy.
The point of this example? A publisher's internal structure is of no interest to Web users. People come to Web sites looking to get a job done or a question answered. The first thing the guys at www.fedex.com did was publish a Web interface to their package tracking database. That was back in 1994. Today, if you want to find out about FEDEX the company, you find a subtle hyperlink to a separate site: www.fdxcorp.com.
I asked Edward Tufte to read this book and he asked "How is it different from the old one?" I said that I had much better ideas and lots of great new examples. I'd just finished writing up the preceding example and recited it to him as an example of my brilliant originality. "Oh yes," he said, "design recapitulates bureaucracy. I wrote that at the back of Visual Explanations [1997]." Check page 148 of Tufte's book to see how original my ideas actually are.
Every competently run site runs a local full-text search engine. Why not go the extra mile and hack the CGI scripts so that the search engine sends you e-mail when a query results in zero matches? Given information about which user queries are failing, you can add content or keywords as appropriate.
At this point you can relax. You aren't a loser with a big budget, a lot of ugly graphics, and no traffic. Users are not leaving your site in frustration, shaking their heads, and saying "They just don't get it." Now that you are safe from the wags at suck.com, what can you do to make your magazine-like site fulfill its potential?
Do these not suggest a somewhat richer place than the sentence in the Michelin guide? Yet the sight of a tourist slavishly following the Michelin guide is a commonplace. Something really fascinating and unexpected is happening in front of him, but he has his nose buried in the guide, trying to figure out what the next official point of interest is. The tourist is literate. Not literate in the "I read Classics at Oxford" sense, but literate in the "knowledge is closed" sense. Everything about Italy can fit into a book. Perhaps the 350 pages of the Green Guide aren't enough, but some quantity of writers and pages would suffice to encapsulate everything worth knowing about Italy.
Oral cultures do not share this belief. Knowledge is open-ended. People
may hold differing opinions without one person being wrong. There is not
necessarily one truth; there may be many truths. Though he didn't grow
up in an oral culture, Shakespeare knew this. Watch Troilus and
Cressida and its five perspectives on the nature of a woman's
love. Try to figure out which perspective Shakespeare thinks is correct.
Feminists, chauvinists, warmongers, pacifists, Jew-haters, inclusivists, cautious people, heedless people, misers, doctors, medical malpractice lawyers, atheists, and the pious are all able to quote Shakespeare in support of their beliefs. That's because Shakespeare uses the multiple characters in each of his plays to show his culture's multiple truths.
In the 400 years since Shakespeare we've become much more literate. There is usually one dominant truth. Sometimes this is because we've truly figured something out. It is kind of tough to argue that a physics textbook on Newtonian mechanics should be an open-ended discussion. Yet even in the natural sciences, one can find many examples in which the culture of literacy distorts discourse.
If you were able to stay awake long enough to read through an academic journal for taxonomic botanists, you'd learn that not all botanists agree on whether Specimen 947 collected from a particular field in Montana is a member of species X or species Y. But you'd see quite clearly that everyone publishing in the journal agreed on the taxonomy, i.e., on how to build a categorization tree for the various species.
I learned all of this interesting stuff about taxonomic botanists from Peter Nürnberg from Texas A&M University. But as much as he educated me about botany, I failed to educate him about Web publishing. He broke the link that I had to his Webnet '96 paper.
However, if you were able to stay awake long enough to get through a cocktail party in a university's department of botany, you'd discover that even this agreement is illusory. There is widespread disagreement on what constitutes the correct taxonomy. Hardly anyone believes that the taxonomy used in journals is correct but botanists have to stick with it for publication because otherwise older journal articles would be rendered incomprehensible. Taxonomic botany based on an oral culture or a computer system capable of showing multiple views would look completely different.
Open today's New York Times. A Republican politician is arguing for relaxed regulations on widgets. A Democrat is quoted arguing in favor of tightened regulations. There is a vote; widget regulations are tightened. On the surface, it looks like multiple perspectives. Yet at a cocktail party, your friend Sue argues that the government shouldn't be regulating widgets at all. Joe interrupts her to say that widget regulation is a canard; we really ought to talk about flag burning. Dana brings up the Simpsons episode where Bart went on a school field trip to the widget factory. Alan tells his grandfather's widget factory stories from World War II. Elizabeth talks about how she was surprised to see that they had no widgets in New Zealand and apparently did not miss them. Compared to the texture of the cocktail party, the New York Times article sounds like two rich old white guys saying more or less the same thing.
Some people like a one-truth world. If you have a huge advertising and PR budget then you can control your public image very effectively in a literate world. Ford Motor Company has enough money to remind you 2,000 times a year that "Quality is Job One"; unless your friend was roasted in a Pinto gas tank explosion, you probably will eventually come to agree. Microsoft via the genius of Bill Gates invented the mouse-windows user interface, reliable operating systems, affordable computing, and the Internet; if you don't think all that is true, ask someone who has never used a computer and whose only exposure to the industry is through mass media.
Perhaps it is because I'm a few billion dollars short of the necessary funds to create a one-truth world of my own, but I think the greatest artistic achievements hold the mirror up to a multiple-truth life.
The Internet and computers, used competently and creatively, make it much easier and cheaper to collect and present multiple truths than in the old world of print, telephone, and snail mail. Multiple-truth Web sites are much more interesting than single-truth Web sites and therefore will get a lot more traffic. For example, the car manufacturers' sites are mostly collections of product brochures tarted up with flashing graphics. They get minimal traffic compared to the plain text rec.auto.* newsgroups, which present the real experience of car owners from around the world. The newsgroups don't have pictures, animation, sound, or video clips, but they have multiple truths.
Okay, enough philosophy and Shakespeare. This is the point in the infomercial where the guy wearing the CAT Diesel cap asks, "Do I need a college education to build one of these here multiple-truth Web sites?" The answer is no.
You don't have to be a traditional publisher to benefit from the
collaboration systems that you'll learn how to use by reading the rest
of this book. Manufacturers can collect and redistribute consumer
comments about dealers who carry their products. Academic researchers
can collect comments, ideas, and questions sparked by their writings.
Does this sound like too much work? If your site is commercial and you claim to be a smart businessperson, then you ought to be able to figure out a way to interact with users more cheaply over the Internet than via 800 numbers. If you are a writer or a photographer who has built a non-commercial site, disintermediating the publisher means total artistic freedom. User feedback might be annoying at times, but if you want to be insulated from your readers, why publish on the Web at all?
What happens if you take all of these steps? Sometimes magic. Here's a passage from Part 2 of my Berlin/Prague story (http://photo.net/bp/part2.html):
"Die Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Strasse had a tired Oriental look and was under restoration. This building demonstrates the power of a single person of conscience. When the Nazis rolled around on Reichkristallnacht and set fire to the synagogue, a lone policeman decided that it was a valuable historical building. He got a fire brigade to put the fire out and then arranged an all-night guard for the place. His efforts were ultimately in vain, for the Nazis had learned something from the Turks in Athens: when you want something to be destroyed, e.g. the Parthenon, put a lot of explosive stuff inside and wait for an accident. Thus the building was used as an ammo dump and an Allied bomb blew the place to smithereens in 1943."I'd cribbed the facts from a guide book and would never have realized that they were wrong if I hadn't put in a comment link (http://db.photo.net/com/philg/bp/part2.html)and waited a year:
"I read your article about Berlin with great interest. For the sake of accuracy, the Nazies did not place ammunition in the Neue Synagoge. It was used as a warehouse. The basement was used as an office. The place was bombed and the main sancturary was burned out, only the front part and the walls were kept standing. After the War, the East Germans blew up the the remains of the sanctuary, "Safety Reasons". The front was left to decay. The front part has been rebuilt, and now it is beeing used as a learning center. How do I know. I lived in the Synagogue from before the War until my arrest and eventual incarceration to Auschwitz May 7. 1943. After my Liberation in 1945, I came back there and visited the place. In 1994, I went back to Berlin on a visit, and naturally I went to see the place. At that time they were rebuilding the place. In the rubble they had found papers of mine from 1937 to relating to my Barmitzwah. A year later, I was invited to the rededication ceremony."It seems safe to assume that people are likely to accept his version of the facts as authoritative. No paper book is ever going to collect a story like this.
-- Contributed by Harry S.Rowe on April 26, 1997
It turns out to be fairly tricky to engineer and maintain systems for collaboration like this and that is partly what this book is about. But I feel so strongly that every site should work this way that I let other publishers use my software and even Web/database server merely by filling out forms from http://photo.net/philg/services.html. It takes about ten minutes to set up a question and answer forum or a comment server and link to it from your site. Try it out right now if you've got a Web site comprising static .html pages.
[Figure 1-1 for the paper book:
the question and answer
forum in http://photo.net/photo,
which contains more than 25,000 archived messages. Answers are e-mailed
automatically to the user who posted the question, even months later.
Users can choose to be notified by e-mail of new messages instantly,
daily, or weekly. (Note: if you'd like to run a similar forum on your
own site, just visit http://photo.net/philg/services.html and fill
out a form. The software is free and you can even use one of my
Web/RDBMS servers for free.)]
Joe Greedy puts up a site showing the cover of his book and a headline: "Buy me for $17." You'd think that this would be the lamest possible Web site. But Mr. Greedy manages to earn extra suck points by making sure that the only ordering option is by telephone. That way the modem crowd will be forced to write down the number on a Post-It and then disconnect before they can order their pile of processed tree carcass.
Jane Clever puts the full text of her book online. With several hundred pages of text instead of one, her content will be several hundred times more likely to attract users of search engines. By enabling online ordering for those dead-tree huggers, Ms. Clever will sell more copies of her book than Mr. Greedy. Also, with 100,000 hits per day, Ms. Clever can sell ads on her site, links to other Web publishers, and consulting services to people who would not have found out about her if she were only an author stuck in the back of a bookstore.
Sites that are adjuncts to physical events or off-the-Web creations almost always disappoint. Millions of dollars are spent by Hollywood studios on companion Web sites for movies. When was the last time you visited one or heard anyone talking about a movie-adjunct site?
Pathfinder did a companion to a traveling museum show by well-known photographers such as Annie Liebowitz. The biggest available pictures on the Web site were tiny, occupying about 1/100th of my 20-inch screen. The editor of the site asked me to add a link from photo.net to the Pathfinder site. I said I'd be happy to add a link if he put up some larger images so that readers didn't just get frustrated. He replied that the museum show photographers were concerned about copyright infringement. I said "Well, maybe they shouldn't be on the Net. They are getting plenty of promotion in bookstores, museums, and magazines. Why don't you find some less known photographers for whom the Web is primary?"
The site could be bad because the people running it only thought of it as an advertisement for the physical show. As long as the show itself was adequate, they didn't feel any shame about having a bad Web site.
In October 1995, the MIT Media Lab threw itself a tenth anniversary
party. The physical event was fabulous: little gifts for everyone,
cleverly packaged; a Photomosaic poster by Rob Silvers; women in plastic
pants. As an adjunct to the physical event, the Media Lab was going to
create the best Web site ever: www.1010.org. They got NYNEX to bring in
a dedicated 45-Mbps T3 network connection; you wouldn't want packets
requested by millions of users to get slowed down working their way
through MIT's backbone before getting to the wider Internet.
Hewlett-Packard donated a huge pile of multiprocessor machines with
disk arrays. The Media Lab hired expert consultants to plug all the computers in
and hook them up to the network. They hired professionals to do graphic
design and site layout for www.1010.org.
The site launched without any magnet content. Nobody had written
any stories or taken any pictures. Every day a Media Lab editor posed a
question and then sat back to watch a
USENET-style discussion
evolve. There were only a handful of postings in each area. One user had
contributed a smiley face: colon dash right-paren. That was his entire
message. This didn't really shock me until I noticed that on a scale
of 1 to 7, this posting had been rated 4.3 by other users. Yes, several
other users had taken the trouble to rate this three-character
posting. When the 10-day Web event was over, the massive disk arrays
held almost enough user-contributed data to fill two 3.5-inch floppies.
How could so much money and hardware have resulted in a site that an elementary school would have been embarrassed to make public? The Web site wasn't primary. The party was the important thing. The Media Lab, one of the last groups at MIT to put up a Web site, had no real Internet culture. They wanted to reach corporate managers and bring them into the physical space of the Lab. Since corporate managers in 1995 didn't tend to have a TCP/IP connection on their desktop, it wasn't obvious how Internet would be useful in attaining the Media Lab's goals.
Don't try to visit www.1010.org. The Media Lab eventually got Web-savvy enough to realize the embarrassment value of such a site and pulled the plug on the server.
Money is nice. Bandwidth is nice. Graphic design is occasionally nice. But if you treat your Web site as a pimple on the butt of something much larger then it will probably be ripe for suck.com.
So that you don't have to break into tomorrow's Prozac supply, let me close this section on a happy note: http://www.dannen.com/szilard.html, Gene Dannen's biography of Leo Szilard, the Hungarian-Jewish theoretical physicist who made the atomic bomb work and then tried to stop Roosevelt from using it. Dannen says that he is writing a book but surely the Web is a richer place because he got distracted from finishing it and did this site instead. Since there isn't a "Szilard, the Movie" or "Szilard, the Book" or "Szilard, the Museum", Leo Szilard Online ended up a rich and fascinating site.
Let's shift gears now from the first site category (Web publishing) and consider the second category: Web-based services.
People assume that computer technology moves forward at a rapid clip, yet no eyebrows were raised when Apple said that its big step forward was going to be licensing the NeXT OS. This is Steve Jobs's late 1980s facelift of Carnegie-Mellon University's early 1980s rewrite (Mach) of Bell Lab's early 1970s Unix operating system. Maybe it is better than Windows NT but, if so, that only makes it a more damning condemnation of the software industry.
Shortly before Apple acquired NeXT, I'd had a foot operation. I disclosed in the pre-op interview that I'd been taking aspirin. The hospital wanted to make sure that my blood would clot adequately so they brought in a phlebotomist who applied what looked like a self-inking rubber stamp to my forearm. Blood soon began to flow. I'd been a regular blood donor and had never fainted or thrown up, but somehow the sight of my blood just oozing out onto my arm was more sickening than collecting in a bag. I managed to control my nausea for the first five minutes but then the phlebotomist got bored and asked me what I did for a living.
"Oh, you're in computers? Do you know that really smart guy?"
I thought for a moment. "Do you mean Bill Gates?"
"Yes, that's the one. What did he invent?"
Our industry is an embarrassment. When a Honda engineer goes to a party, it would be rare for another guest to say "Oh, you design cars for Honda? You know, last Friday my husband's Accord just exploded while he was pulling out of the garage." But admit that you're a programmer and you can't get out of the room without hearing about somebody's crashed Macintosh or Windows machine. Furthermore, to the extent that there have been any software innovations in the last 40 years, the Microsoft Monopoly either gets credit for them or keeps them from getting into users' hands.
What keeps me from chucking it all and becoming a tire salesman? The power that Web service development gives the individual programmer. My epiphany came thanks to Hewlett-Packard. I was supposed to fly out to their Corvallis, Oregon factory and give a talk. I figured that, being Fortune 500 types, these guys would demand overhead slides or even some kind of animated display from a laptop. My laptop had been gathering dust since I'd parked all of my important files on my Web server. Nor did I really know how to use any presentation software. At MIT, the students are forced to listen to us, even if we arrive to lecture with no more impressive equipment than a piece of chalk. I guess you're supposed to have a fancy presentation if you get invited to speak at an academic conference, but I'd written enough nasty things about credentialism in my Web site that nobody was inviting me to speak anywhere (and then I drove another few nails in the coffin of my academic career with http://photo.net/philg/school/tuition-free-mit.html).
I was all set to install and learn PowerPoint, a classic desktop bloatware package for making slides. But then I worried that I'd have to transport my presentation out to Corvallis on a floppy disk and hope that the HP guys had the same version of PowerPoint. It hit me: why not just make the slides HTML files on my Web server? Every HP desktop and conference room would surely have a Web browser and Internet access. I created a directory and built a few files and then the data modeler in me rebelled. All of these slides have the same structure: title, preamble, bullet item, bullet item, bullet item, postamble, standard footer. It is always a bad idea to take structured data and put it into an unstructured text file that a computer program can't read. What if one day I wanted to reformat my slides to look pretty?
The slides should really be in a relational database with a Web front-end. Why should I have to know how to use any tool other than Netscape Navigator to edit my slides? Once it was all in a database, I should be able to collaborate with other people. I should be able to authorize my friend Ellen at Mills College in Oakland to edit a presentation. If I wanted something pretty, the system ought to be able to grind out the slides in PDF or PostScript for an HP PhotoSmart printer. If I wanted something pretty on-screen, the system ought to be able to serve the slides with a reference to a cascading style sheet. I should be able to lose my laptop and my desktop hard disk and yet still come back five years later to find my presentation intact in the database.
There is a point to this story. It took only a few days of programming to build WimpyPoint (http://wimpy.arsdigita.com) up to the level that it was more useful to me, and people like me, than PowerPoint. The Web and the idea of Web-based services is so powerful that a few days of work by a good programmer is sufficient to make something better than Microsoft has managed to produce in 10 years using the "herd of losers building desktop apps" approach. Furthermore, I can design the system in a sufficiently clean and perspicuous manner that I won't have to charge for it. If I'm already maintaining a Unix box running Oracle on the Internet, the marginal cost of dealing with WimpyPoint users is minimal.
Network computer users will burst into the Web looking for server-based solutions to the computing problems that they formerly solved with desktop apps. You can't be successful in the Web services business unless you are a good engineer. Bad engineering in the desktop app business is costly for users. Given that Microsoft has a monopoly, a bug in Word might waste a lot of user time but it isn't going to cost Microsoft any sales. On the other hand, if I screw up the user interface design or the back-end database programming for WimpyPoint, I'll have 100 email messages/day from upset users and I'll be inspecting my Unix box's entrails every night until 5 am.
Many of the following chapters in this book are directed at helping you
engineer Web-based services in such a way that users have a pleasant
experience while minimizing your costs.
This chapter was about people talking to computers and people talking to each other with a computer mediator. The next chapter is about how computers talking to each other could finally deliver all of the benefits that the Computer Age was supposed to have conferred on us (and, if you insist, how you can make a buck off of it).
The irony of users complaining about being their own sys-admins (or having others making that complaint for them) is that personal computing started out as a revolution against sys-admin and IS tyranny.How then have we come to the current pass? The answer I think lies in that the first PC's were much simpler than the ones being sold today and were bought by people much more technically sophisticated than the people buying them today. Being your own sys-admin for a first-generation Apple II wasn't much of a problem for the hobbyists who bought those systems. For those users, owning their own computer (and everything that went with it) was a dream.
Over time, the computers have become more complex while the technical knowledge of the average buyer has declined. Now we have people who can't program their VCR clock buying systems that have megabytes of system code and configuration info distributed among hundreds and hundreds of files. Although there are tens of millions of home computers in this country, I wonder how many of them are even operational. I certainly know personally of many people who have bought a computer and some software, had something go wrong which they couldn't fix (which pretty much includes everything that could go wrong), and then as a result the computer just gathers dust.
Are net-PCs the answer? While web browsers are wonderful things and much can be done with form- based applications, I wouldnt care to do photo- editing through a form-based interface. Similarly, if one reviews productivity apps (apps whose purpose is to produce documents) and considers which ones could be reasonably replicated through a web browser form-based interface, the answer is: not many.
Thus, to solve the general application problem we are back trying to get general purpose bits to the user that are appropriate to whatever task he is trying to carry out rather than just leveraging his browser. This brings up bandwidth. Trying to download and run software through a 28K modem (or 56K for that matter - not that 56K modems ever much run at 56K anyway) is not something anyone would want to experience.
Conceivably, DSL / cable modems will create an opportunity to change this. But even then bandwidth to the net will be much, much lower than bandwidth to a hard disk. As a result, I don't think we can see a major revolution here without some pretty serious changes in the way modern applications are built. Possibly, a component technology solution would work well bits only downloaded when you actually need them; so if you dont need indexing in your word- processor, you dont have to download indexing to your word-processor.
Applications that work according to the above model are not impossible, but certainly arent being built today. The PC-centric answer to the administration problems would be to simplify administration rather than go to any thin client: keep the current applications and hardware, but lower the administration costs through better hardware and software.
If I had to guess an outcome, in the short-term I would bet on the PCs ability to lower administration costs rather than on the thin client. In the long-term, however, I like the concept of the thin client better. No matter what you do with simplified administration, PCs will remain inherently very statey with lots and lots of local state. This is bad for two reasons: (1) failures tend to be catastrophic; lots of user info lost, and (2) lack of ubiquity: if Im away from my computer, Im away from my stuff; even if someone elses computer is available, its not of any use because my information isn't on it and even if it was, the tools aren't on it.
-- Bowen Simmons, September 4, 1998
My first object lesson about sites for events was the 1994 World Cup website. At the time it was actually a novelty for a large sporting event to have an associated website. You could get all the scheduling information, all the game scores, even pictures of the teams and the best plays.And about a month after the World Cup was over, the site disappeared. My vision of a perpetual online record of the '94 World Cup was not shared by the site's organizers...
Four years later we have www.worldcup.com again, but the content from '94 is conspicuously absent: oops, the sponsors are different! I guess Sun isn't going to cough up their backup tape for HP and EDS...
-- Ben Jackson, October 7, 1998
Although I do recognize the possibilities it presents, I don't think I agree with a web-based methodology of computing. To me, the Web has a few primary advantages. Firstly, (almost!) everyone with Internet access has a copy of Netscape or IE. So it's common. Secondly, it's fairly easy to publish content on the Web. You have to be able to know how to (1) type and (2) use an FTP client.But I don't think the Network Computer hoohah has a lot to offer me, the non-common individual. I like being the "system administrator," if you will, of my PC. I don't use Hotmail because I like having specific apps do specific things in definite ways.
The Web is just a protocol. Let's not forget that.
-- Ian Samuel, November 14, 1998
I doubt Net PCs will ever take off. In our increasingly paranoid world where people obsess over even the slightest thing (like "cookies" which, I admit, I obsessed and worried about until I came to the realization that when I reinstalled Netscape they - along with their use as an evil and insidious tracking method by "The Man" - would all be erased) nobody will commit to leaving their personal files on a server somewhere far far away, where anybody with a system account can waltz through it (barring "uncrackable" encryption of course, but who has the time to encode a 4096-bit key into a letter to their mom before they upload it to a remote server. Hell, who knows how to use a 4096-bit key anyway?)But back to the argument that standalone computers and too complex for the regular user, I disagree. Within this argument is hidden one thing that everybody seems to forget. That's that people will learn along with technology. Watch kids these days and they play on computers more than their parents. I frequently see web pages with fairly complicated HTML coding and fancy graphics - all done by young kids. Indeed human curiosity will catch up to technology, and that's why we're only hitting the technology revolution now although computers have been out for 20 years. Because it's only now that the computer has gone mainstream. Give technology another 20 years and you'll find the managers of all major corporations (their previous COs - who were only slightly computer literate - having since passed down the throne to their successors) will be entirely Web savvy and will know how to fix their own computers.
The argument can be brought up that at that point computers will still be 20 years ahead of those COs, but I would reply that the general concepts involved in the use of a computer will probably not change sufficiently to cause them to be unable to pick up a program and use it within an hour. That's the real difference between the generations. Yesterday's generation never used computers as kids, they don't truly understand them. They use them to get a job done, and only real "computer nerds" know what's going on behind the scenes (even at a basic level). Today's kids know what's going on and, even though this knowledge is not necessarily in-depth or technical, they can apply this knowledge and experience to quickly understand new applications.
Yesterday's generation grew up on television, and had to adapt their minds to the way of thinking of the computer (and it *is* a way of thinking). Today's generation is growing up on computers, and have no need to adapt. They already communicate with computers.
Anyway I might be totally wrong, and these are just my opinions, but there they are on your web site - fulfilling your web site's goal - so they're out there at least. The future's coming, and the answers to our questions will arrive. Just give them a few years.
JMC
-- Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston, March 3, 1999
The argument thin- or fat-client is a red herring. The key to the idea is to realize we are standing in the middle of a giant data organization problem. Where I choose to process that data is immaterial. There are millions and millions of lines of bad code processing data on servers and feeding the results to Suffering Losers. The challenge is to structure the storage of the data so it is reusable, reliable, and available.Today, I have to keep 3 versions of Word on my campus to prevent a half-dozen Phds from killing themselves. How could Word possibly surpress the suicidal tendencies of Phds teaching at a small Kentucky community college? Each has his dissertation composed in Word and none of the newer versions will correctly interpret the older formatting. Blessed be the woman who let me archive her dissertation and the WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS that created it to a CD.
I should be able to re-perceive my data without losing value.
On a personal note, I read the passage about Oracle's site and howled. I've been trying to do business with them for a week and they make it very difficult. The Java takes forever to load, only to provide a pretty menu at the top. I am continually referred to useless links. Why they think I would want to contact only the Corporate Communications department after reading the press release on Oracle for Linux, I do not know.
Onward.
-- Heather Bayless, March 11, 1999
I think something that excacerbates some of the issues put forth here are user's perceptions of a computer (read software) as a solution as opposed to a tool. (not my words originally, but I can't remember where I read the phrase).When you look at the PC as a tool, an entity that requires knowledge, skill, TRAINING, and MAINTENANCE, it becomes more apparent how implementation should be approached and executed.
Fat clients, thin clients, dumb terminals, heck, even an abucus and a blank pile of sticky notes won't help a bit unless you (or, if you happen to be the sys admin, your users) know how to use them.
Unfortunately Software/Hardware companies have fed to the masses the image that computers are solutions , and users (read MIS directors) continually gobble up the "solution" idea. Grrr.
Now if I could just get my MIS director to put down that yellow "I AM SUPERMAN" sign.
-- Bill Dunlap, April 6, 1999
Dear Phil, I added a link to the next section at (what is now) the bottom of the page so that users (like me) who bother to read the commentary on each section won't have to scroll back up to go to the Next section.
-- Jon Nehring, May 3, 1999
Computer literate students? Now *THAT* IS a joke. I goto a public high-school and there are only five known computer literate people in the building (seven if you include staff, and even the students often know more in certin fields then the staff members.) Children today have NO DESIRE TO LEARN. Kids download porno of the internet and print it out on the lab's B/W printer. One time, because I was getting annoyed with the constintly changing desktop backrounds, I desided to attrib +r explorer.bmp (if you tell ie to set a certin picture as the background wallpaper that is the file name it writes the picture to) four months later and they have yet to figure it out. Heck, there are only five students in the school (same five) who can even USE DOS. only one (me) uses it regularly, and only one (me again) desires to go beyond their current bounds.We have a linux server in the school, nobody knows how to use it. One day I asked the teacher if I could play around with it (it isn't serving anything, the computers it provides internet gateway services for are currently down, have been for two weeks) he was too afriad to let me play on it. Heck, not like I could do anything to a server which didn't work in the first place...)
-- Devlin Bentley, June 14, 1999
First, there are a couple things.Perspective.
I'm from the Third World, not the same place as MIT. I've worked in Corporate America, so I've some of that perspective too. Done some sys-admin as well.
I agree with you generally on the magazine site vs content site thing. I love the sites where people get really personal. Hate the ones where you have to wait for graphics. REALLY HATE the ones where the whole site is an image map with no text.
Now, dumb terminal vs PC vs NC. I've done the WEB with each. I've setup and maintained each for clients. Dumb terminals are the easiest things on the planet. Love them. But users and the general public hate them. No graphics. PCs, God, I hate them. But I love them, too. Infinitely configurable. I've put at least four different OS on this one. Right now it dual-boots two. I love that aspect of PC. They can change, become something different.
NCs should be the best thing, but the Web is too slow, man. People accustomed to TV can't wait. And the Web is still too passive. How do you do word processing on the Web? Spreadsheets? If you could answer that, yeah, I'd do NCs.
My solution? At work, I lock down the PCs tight. The users can change their backgrounds, screen savers, desktop themes. That's it. Reduce the PC to the point where it is essentially a sealed box. Right now, I've got it to where I just configure one box and roll out the configuration to the other PCs. Nobody's complained yet.
But I hate Microsoft. I hate what they've done to the industry. Stifled creativity. For that alone, I hate them. I'm forced to use their products. I have a family to support. And believe me, Microsoft products generate employment for sys-admins. So there's a benefit for me. When I came back home to the Third World, there were no jobs for a UNIX guru. Everyone was using Windows. So I learned Windows.
There's the Third World perspective. Here, there is no choice. It's a fight for survival. You do what you have to do. But damn, life here is creative.
I'm reading your book. I'll think about your concepts. Community-based web services. Yeah, but reminder services ain't going to put bread on the table. Not enough people will pay for that in the Third World. It's gotta be real. Produce real benefit. Not just convenience.
I'm more interested in how to use the web to change things politically. How to educate, "empower" (hate that word!) with it. I don't think computers and the web will influence the world until the technology is cheap and pervasive. Then, the planet will be different. But now, the question is, in dollars and cents terms, how to get technology to the people? How to make it cheap enough that the have-nots can have access to it, so it can make a difference in their lives? Down here, even electricity is expensive. We got phones in my village last December. Really.
So, we take what we get, Microsoft or not. Thank God for Michael Dell. God bless that man and his toll-free phone number. Other corporations pay lip service to the world outside the US. Not Michael Dell. Toll-free straight to us. Shipping to your door. St. Michael. Empowering the Third World.
It's amazing, really. I read in the US press about how cheap computers are. When you convert US prices to local currency and compare it to a monthly salary here, man, it's frightening how expensive computers still are. And this is one of the better Third World economies. Perspective.
NCs and UNIX are nice. Love them. But I can't, except in rare cases, implement them. PCs are what work at this level. Enough.
Richard
-- Richard Hamel-Smith, June 27, 1999
Define irony : Hotmail, one of the best, most original web-based service that demonstrates how web-based services can make life easier for somebody who can't configure Eudora, is now a revenue-generating subsidiary of Microsoft Corp.
On a side note, I'd like to add why I personally hate Microsoft, Intel, Iomega, and any other company that creates products for the PC-owner. I dislike any company who can offer a product which is not the best product, yet still have the greatest market share. There are other office suites that rival Microsoft (such as Wordperfect), and there are definitely operating systems that rival Windows, yet Microsoft is the one defining the trend of these industries. AMD has been making processors that exceed Intel's performance starting with the K6-2, and yet Intel still controls the market of PC's prices over $1000. SyQuest makes drives that have faster throughtputs, higher capacities, and cheaper media than Zip or Jaz, yet everybody has a Zip drive. When these companies define standards that capture market share, the development of the industry is defined by their intentions. Windows 98 was not a vast improvement over Win95B, and the only major change in it was the WinNT driver system, yet everybody had to run out to spend $90 to buy an upgrade or even more to buy a full-install because the upgrades didn't always work.
This, as a user, makes me sick.
-- Joshua Ginsberg, July 5, 1999
I didn't realize tire was an acceptable alternative to tyre. I looked it up at dictionary.com.Now _that_ is a useful site.
So I guess I won't spell-flame you :-)
Like you'd care!
-- Daniel McKeown, August 4, 1999
To the user above who complains that the best systemis not often the most widely accepted:Beta was technologically superior to VHS, yet we all have VHSs today.
Sad, but true: the winners are not necessarily those with the best products.
J
-- Jonathan Mesiano-Crookston, August 6, 1999
Yes, please put the "Next Chapter" link at the bottom of the comments section too, Philip. Thanks.I am still reading 'the-book' and learning new technology, but my spotty CS career goes back to 1970. Here are some ideas for expanding web computing in the future:
Might it be possible some day to put X-server-like capabilities into Netscape/Ultra-Xd-Out-Html? Appropriately leaned down, of course, and confined within browser windows. Obviously there are bandwidth restrictions. By 'lean' I mean, e.g., as little overhead as possible for delivering mostly text, but with the possibility to send window/graphic drawing instructions too. And web-server-side applications continuing to run, sending data streams to Netscape and receiving key/mouse-events. Anyone wanna bet that this will happen in some form? (Perhaps it wont even have to suck air like Java applets do :-)-; (<-Janus) Perhaps it will...). Most likely it will have to wait for more net bandwidth.
Also along the lines of maximizing the potential useful 'fat' on the server side, I wonder when my (or anyone's) generic ISP will let me put any programs I want on their server, and allow them to run however they want in my own personal allotted 'sandbox' (150mb of disk, say, and a tiny share of server CPU), whenever some client clicks my link? Most of us cannot afford to run our own web server. That's what we pay the ISP a modest fee for. What we will be allowed to do on their machine is the issue.
In both the above ideas, the user himself might have to restrain his impulse to try to do too much, and bear in mind the severe CPU and net bandwidth restrictions that exist. But even with only a trickle of these resources, I think many useful services could be built by small-time users.
Next (related?) topic: good web sites/services (not just my ISP) will be judged partially by how much of my personal state/stuff the service will be able to keep for me, reliably and endurably. Kudos to Phil (and anyone else who does it) for already providing some such services.
These last two ideas point toward making ISPs more like the original Compuserve: a time-sharing service offered on remote web servers.
Lastly, how can a net service store and use some stuff on my local disk? Man does not live by cookies alone. I don't have to let a server-side app. create .exe's, or use too much space or someone else's files.... But most useful apps create files for me. The browser would undoubtedly become involved in brokering this type of security. (Sometimes it seems to me that the browser is becoming the center of the computing universe...).
I believe that all these issues need to be explored to fully use the potential of web-based services, and to minimize the net bandwidth problem. They all, particularly the last issue, involve grave security concerns, which, however, may not be totally insoluble.
Happy web-romping everyone.
David King
-- David King, September 14, 1999
I am only putting a response in this section because of the previous post by Devlin Bentley. I feel sorry for him that so few kids have the level of knowledge that my two year old has. While I realize that I had an advantage of having a computer since I was 6 years old (presently 22), I have watched my two year take my computer apart. Although it wasn't what I had wanted him to do, but the concepts of computer maintenance are already there. I don't have to get into the classice discussion of what everything is (althought I will probably want to later make sure there is no miscommunication). This all from a two year old.I consider myself a Internet Geek. Although I have only been online for about 6 years I consider that a long time in an industry that seems to like to change browsing technology every year. 75% of the people that I go to for help on the internet tend to be about 16 years old. That is 6 years younger than me! And they know more about it than I do! I have also recently talked to a 12 year old that is excited about learning C++ (a language I still lack).
What more can I present to prove to you Devlin Bentley, that the kids out there are in fact computer literate? Try traveling to say CA or NY and poll how many have computers. How many can rebuild theirs or install components. How many can fix an OS problem like the blue screen of death. Or even how many can understand the error code on the blue screen of death. I feel you will be very surprised at the responses.
Thanks for everyone's time!
-- Judd Pickell, September 19, 1999
I admire your vision. It strikes me however that most of the comments thus far, share your feelings about uncle Bill. Henry ford said "you can have your car any color you want as long as its black" from my admitedly inocent point of view. I would prefer what we have to nothing.More to my comment regarding the chapter, an unfortunate truth, my truth is that commerce is important to all of us. If we could all be assured that miss clever would truly be rewarded for her considerable effort after having posted her book on the web, more of us might be inclined to follow her lead. Even if greedy pete is narrow minded in his approach to web sales at least his benifit even if limited is asured.
I agree that sites should be far more intuitive, unfortunately technical ability and creativity and imagination do not allways arrive in the same package.
thanks for shareing, i enjoy your writing.
-- Ken Flickinger, September 22, 1999
Hmmm... I only now, for the first time, clicked on the suck.com link - and I can make no sense of it (the site seems bizarre, and without spending more time there than I have available, I can't get Phil's allusion). Up to now I always assumed it was the same thing as: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ but it isn't... Am I missing something?
-- Barry McMullin, October 19, 1999
On the topic of Network Computers:I love them.
I'm a college student at UMBC, dual-majoring in IFSM and Music Recording. For fun and profit, I manage the computers of Student Media, an organization which encompasses the radio station, newspaper, yearbook, etc.
The Retriever Weekly has a newsroom with 2 phones and several computers, a place for people to write articles. Some of the machines run Windows 98, and they're wretched. As a result of being used by a large and varied amount of people, they have a lifespan of about a week or 2; we use Ghost to re-do the hard drive image every week so that printing and MSOffice don't explode.
3 of the machines are P-90s, 16M of RAM--Win98 was abysmal on these. So, I put Linux on them, and made them into X-terminals. Since we use a fileserver (Linux w/ Samba), everyone is used to logging in to the Windows machines anyway, so No Big Deal. I put KDE on them, and the most recently used apps (StarOffice, Netscape, AIM, and an SSH terminal so that they can get at their Pine accounts) with their own easy-to-find buttons, and waited. These machines are now much faster than their beefier Windows counterparts--they never break (except for hardware failure), and many people prefer them. And, as a matter of their nature, each user can customize their own environment and return to it exactly the same, despite the computers being public terminals! People are much happier not having to enter their Buddy List into every computer in the room. Note that none of these people are computer experts by ANY means...Linux is a GREAT desktop if set up properly.
Personally, I am a huge fan of UNIX-type operating systems, especially Linux. I think that server-based computing makes so much more sense--of course, you have to have a good admin, or it can be a nightmare. However, I LOVE security and I love what I do--so I subscribe to BUGTRAQ, and patch every hole as soon as it's discovered. This is far better than having your Windows98 machine connected via Comcast@Home without any of the Windows update patches, or any sort of firewall--to address an earlier poster, it would be far easier for me to "waltz through" hundreds of Windows machines on the @home network than for someone with even a shell account on one of my servers to get at someone's private data. Some people just want to check their e-mail and then go play rugby--that's why there are people like me, to think about computers and security all day :)
-- Ray Shaw, January 13, 2000
In regards to Barry McMullin's comment above: I don't think you are missing anything. Perhaps suck.com looked somewhat different when this chapter was written. You mentioned Web Pages That Suck, however, I think losers.org is a much better and much more thorough site for exemplifying what I believe Alex was referring to when he titled this chapter. I highly recommend it for a good laugh.
Great book, Alex. I'm going to have to send for one of your pictures with an autograph soon. (You did a good job too, Phillip).
-- David Guarneri, January 20, 2000
suck.com was created in 1996 by two employees of Wired magazine, at that time the owners of hotwired.com. The name suck.com arose because their original activity was to write a daily essay about the web, and primarily the big corporate websites like hotwired and Time-Warner's Pathfinder (deceased). These sites sucked, the domain was available, the pun was irresistible. Suck's editorial focus shifted to American popular culture in mid-1997, but the suck.com name was too good a brand to change.There are a number of suck-related links at Carl spotting and an illuminating, though sycophantic article in the archives of Wired magazine.
In short, suck.com no longer concerns itself solely with criticising the web, so the next edition of Philip's book probably ought to get a new chpater heading to avoid confusing readers. Mind you, that's probably the only confusing bit in the entire book.
-- Two Imperial College, January 21, 2000
Anyone that actually believes a two year old is capable of disassembling any computer and restoring it to working order is in serious trouble when it comes to anything, let alone using a computer. Most children don't know what OS means let alone how to use one. High schools do not teach children how to operate a computer, with the exception of microsoft works. Even then it is slight learning at it's best. It's apparent when children are more familiar with the internet than adults are it stems from playing games and emailing each other. Try asking them something about a specific software or database program. Try it. They have no idea what most software titles are let alone what they do. If it's used for playing they might know a little. I have two children in high school and they aren't taught anything about using a computer let alone it's history. I think your book rams the point straight home. Software manufactures are only making things more difficult. Read the comments before mine. This should prove to everyone how confusing and complicated most programs are. For a company to re-write it's software then to find out it isn't compatible with it's previous versions should be crimnal. To sell updated software that doesn't work properly should also be crimnal. Again, you're right. The bandwidth is the biggest problem the internet has right now. Talk to people. Not computer, software and programming edcuated people. Those are a very small percentage of computer users. Most everyone I know, and the stories I'm told all stem from people being sick of waiting for something that isn't there. Waiting being the most widely used word. Next comes waiting for crap that they didn't want in the first place. Until everyone and everything starts thinking of compatibility and simplification the internet will remain a playground. So will the home computer. I for one would like to see everyone on the internet, but lets link together. The idea of network computers is the only real idea for the future.
-- Ben Sweeten, January 21, 2000
where's the other half of www.halfbrain.comThis is a very good example of a very bad Web-based application. For starters, it only runs on Windows using IE or AOL. That leaves me out as a Netscape user, or as a user of any other operating system other than Windows. Is that why they call it half-brained?
halfbrain.com already sucks out loud, and I haven't even tried it!
-- Michael Domino, January 28, 2000
I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your prospective on good web design and agree 100 percent. I think the latest wave in web design, pages overly burdened with JAVASCRIPT are a pain. Javascript is nice for certain applications but people using it to display entire websites, are, I feel following the wrong path. It's VERY slow!! One can do so much with HTML 4.0 and up - why rely so much on Javascript? It takes forever to display a page, the browsers still don't handle it uniformly and HTML displays things excellently!
By the way, I, too, am a programmer. I was referred to this site from a mailing list and have found it very interesting and refreshing!
regards,
Sue Widemark
-- Sue Widemark, January 28, 2000
Hi there!I found myself nodding agreement a lot as I read your chapter and some of the comments.
Ok, here goes...
To the dude from the 3rd world; check out linux. It will take those old computers you're using that are crawling dejectedly under the load of win98/2000 and make them fly... but you probably already know that, so I won't belabour the point:)
I think the key to making distributed apps that work is that the means of communication between the server and client has to be text. Text permits a high degree of compression at the points where it can happen, and is also understood by all systems out there. There are few things that are more annoying than going to a web based service and finding out that you need a particular system/browser/revision... though the revision part isn't so bad. The system part sucks huge. All those people loading up their sites with flash content should consider that flash only exists on two of the many systems out there. I know this because I have a PC and I'm NOT running windows. Hell, I'm not even running linux. If someone thinks that I'm going to give them the time of day, or even any business, when their desire for the PHB flashy toys keeps me out of their sites, they're deeply wrong.
I agree with the poster above; straight HTML is still the way to go if you want to be sure to reach the widest audience possible. I believe that so strongly that I coded my company's web site in HTML 3.2 earlier this year... which means that it renders fine for the construction contractor using netscape 3 on a creaky 486 in his office. Plus, it loads fast.
The best web based services are the ones that allow people to communicate. However, there is one thing I'd like to add to that. For long collaborative conversations with many participants NNTP is still the best protocol. I wish there was a better way to integrate NNTP into the website.
And this brings me to the final point, regarding web pages that suck. A server on the internet should offer a platter of alternative ways to get from A to B, and the web is only one of them.
Hell, I really should get back to trying to code a usenet front-end for my web server in REXX...
I have enjoyed the book so far. Thank you for making all this info available!
Jack
-- Jack Troughton, February 21, 2000
I just had a comment to add to Sue Widemark's comment. I am a fledgling techie (and I mean ROOKIE). In a web class I am taking we have just addressed Javascript and talked about the fact that many people disable this feature in their web browser because of security issues, since Javascript runs on the user's computer and could be written to do bad and arrogant things (the example was Javascript written to close browsers with the message "Sorry, I don't like your kind of browser"). Our instructor suggested that we only use Javascript for cosmetic things and if we use it to do something important to make sure and have a backup way of doing it for those who disable Javascript. If this is really the case it sounds like too much work so why does anyone bother with Javascript at all?
-- Christy Zinn, February 25, 2000
I tremendously enjoyed the comments on this page after the original content, many of the viewpoints expressed here I've lost touch with after many years of being a geek. My one contribution is to suggest 'computer co-operatives.' I've noted that many upscale apartments, hotels, and condominium complexes now include a building wide network from blueprints on up, and therefore furnish high-speed access for a much smaller price since the cost to give access to entire building is much lower per person. Possibly this concept can be extended to having linux/X-windows servers, a sysadmin, and an X-client per apartment included in the cost as well.... Computers have not yet reached user-friendly, and your average computer user can't administrate win95, let alone linux. Computers are more advanced that cars, right? So why are we expected to each fix our own computer, and why aren't the computer controls simpler?
-- Shae Erisson, March 13, 2000
I wanted to reply to the javascript question.While this is probably not the best forum for javascript (hint hint), the answer to your question is:
There are some really compelling reasons to use javascript. At the same time, I consider client side scripting to be overused. If you're ever in doubt, check out how successful Philip has been and the level of technology he is using (relatively lightweight eh?).
- Javascript lends a great deal of interactivity to web pages
- Javascript has almost ubiquitous support (1.0 and mostly 1.1)
- Javascript can take a *lot* of load off of a server (especially if you are working on a browser based application which would normally require a great deal of server side processing)
- Javascript lends capabilities which you could not do on the server side (for example, menus, the whole of dhtml, etc).
I would also state that my statistics off of 11 web sites show that most people have javascript enabled (like 99%). It has been my experience that statistics are a lot more accurate than professors. =)
Thanks,
PS. Email me if you have more questions, or check out my home page. http://thedogpile.com
-- jon d, April 17, 2000
I think your book is inspiring, but I think the future you envision for the Web is nihilistic.Kind of funny how we humans (not only Microsoft) repeat the same mistakes time after time, isn't it? Everytime a new technology is developed, or a scientific discovery advances minkind, many will proclaim the end of whatever. After discovering the lever, the man said: "Give me a lever and I'll move the earth"; When vitamins were discovered, many thought that will be the cure of every known disease; Nowadays the miracle is genetic technology, clonation, etc.
Back to the Web, it is great, but still there is a critical question left without answer: Where will the money come from? That of course, does not bother professors at MIT, who work all day on their favorite projects, while everyone else thinks they are teaching students. Where will the money come from? "There is no free lunch", however everybody using the Web, likes to think otherwise. Where will the money come from? Take a look at "real world". I have visited your recommended link www.fatbrain.com, tried their PowerPoint, only to discover that the presentations will forever reside at their site, forcing hits not only from me, but also from any other that will want to view "my" presentation. Where will the money come from? Advertisements? I ignore them, and I think most of the people looking for information on the Web does the same. A fair deal would be that the telephone provider, or whatever communication service the user has, will pay a fee for every hit. The user pays for the use, the content maker is beeing payed for his added value.
-- Julio Maidanik, April 24, 2000
A follow-up on "Example 4: University Research Lab"...
I'm a grad student at a famous old university in England and I was sitting in the tea room this morning while a prof was trying to convince an undergrad student to apply for a Ph.D. position.
Prof: "You should take a look at our group Web site; it's excellent!"
Student: "Well I looked for some information about your research projects and I couldn't find any..."
Prof (interrupts): "Well it needs a lot of content added but it's great."
When I went back down to my lab I thought I would take a look at this wonderful web site. Of course the guy had renamed the main page and so the links from every other site in my department (and every other site in the world, for that matter) are broken...
-- David Sampson, May 10, 2000
About ignoring advertisers: Noam Chomsky thinks that TV advertising is about controlling broadcast content. It doesn't matter whether you read the ad or not. This would appear to account for the absurdity of advertising heavy military hardware companies(I don't just mean rocket launchers and assault weapons) on PBS. But perhaps if this wonderfully subversive site survives, we haven't too much to worry about?
-- albert rogers, May 25, 2000
Well, first post, as it goes on Slashdot.This book is good, I've read it several times on-line, and I bought it last week, just to have it more handy when at home.
Moving it has lost all the comments which often added much insight. I hope you'll be able to get them over here, because I miss them.
-- Paul K Egell-Johnsen, June 9, 2000
This thread seems unstable. I ran linux on the desktop for 11 months, and I can't stand it. I'm an avid mac /windows/ linux user, and even kde is klunky on my machine. That said, let's get this over with...I would suggest a larger topic of conversation to this thread. Given that technology is something that we're pretty much going to learn how to live with, how do you all feel about tech always moving towards greater complexity?
IMHO, the most useful technology devices out there are the simplest (generally). The thing I read over and over again is that people want the complexity of implmentations hidden from them. They want the best camcorder, but how many people know how a camcorder works? They want the best personal organizer, but very few people actually survey the market. They just buy a palm. They want next generation web development tools, but at the same time, they don't want to have to deal with complex scripting languages or delayed load times.
Oh progress! It leads to greater complexity, often without justification. We rely on future technologies to save us from the present techno-nightmare we have created. Voice activated cell phones don't make it safer to drive, but they're selling like crazy right now and many a news program has reported on them. Being on the phone while driving causes accidents. What I'm saying is that we are buying into technological progress as movement, not necessarily innovation that benefits you, the person who is buying it.
Further, we as consumers tend to be very complacent about our choices, picking the most expensive or popular item, instead of the item which would serve our needs (most people could use a 29$ organizer instead of a 500$ palm pilot).
It's the treadmill called consumerism, and although there is a backlash to consumerism in general, technology seems to slip away from criticism. I don't mean it doesn't get criticized... look at the launch of windows 98 (it crashed!). Think about it this way. You and I know that you can run a perfectly good computer science department with 200 dollar pcs and a free unix operating system. And the very same machines would more than serve the majority of needs for net access worldwide. Yet, we go out and spend a *premium* to buy machines *new* from manufacturers which lose value *faster than anything else that has ever been produced in history.* Why? Because I believe we have been lead to believe that progress means more complex.
How to get off of this treadmill? I can't think of a way to open source capitalism, though perhaps someone more enterprising than me will model a way to do it on a palm 5. =)
Look and buy simple devices, low cost tools, and look for the analyze the essential elements which you need to get the job done. Then stop there and do an honest assessment of what you need. Often, it will be less than you think. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from nations less fortunate then ourselves (US here). You do not need all of this to have a good happy life.
Ok. It's late, I'm tired. That probably was not very coherant or spelled correctly. Ah well! Let the flaming begin!
newt
http://theDogPile.com
-- jon dillon, July 20, 2000
In reference to the posted "feedback comment" idea that the public will be fixing and maintaining their own computers, if computers are like cars, meaning objects of technology that have been around for many years, how is it that mechanics can rob us poor ignorant people still? Cars do require special equipment and muscle, but I do not think that is the main reason. The main reason is fear,laziness, or lack of time to learn in an already busy blue collar life. The other reason is the education establishment that continually convinces the youth and their parents that they will do fine with a (cough..cough) liberal arts degree. The idea that "I hate computers", "I hate math"...is a problem, then later down the road , "i hate waiting tables"..(grin).
-- anonguy anon, February 2, 2001
Computers are designed to manipulate data, networks are designed to communicate date. We combine the two to give structure and meaning to that data. We should not accommodate the computer but the computer should accommodate us, yet we teach and learn how to accommodate the computer. We do this inadvertently, such as, defining the computer or/and application as a tool it is not a tool it is medium for information exchange. Is your phone a tool, are books tools.I am enjoying your site very much
-- steve karvanis, February 6, 2001
Since computer scientists and programmers start counting at 0. Step 0 of "Building a Multiple Truth Website": NEVER NEVER NEVER form a committee. Remember the cardinal rule "Website design is AUTOCRATIC".Everyone who forgets this rule is doomed to repeat the "University Research Lab" site in Example 4. Four (or more) levels of management on a site that is useless anyway. Where I work we recently went through a "Website Redesign". We formed a committee, of 50 people. I can feel all of you cringing. I had to program the design they eventully came up with, while impressive in theroy (dynamic menu creation, database, perl, and ColdFusion driven) there is over 200 k of overhead for every page. Higher Education's method of "Innovation" , particularly in Business oriented environments, may work for some things but not for lean, fast, effective websites. Now less than 6 months later we are redesigning again. This time however, the comittee is 2 people (marketing director and webdesigner) better than 50 but, I still have to program what they come up with.
-- Eric Richardson, February 24, 2001
Cat
"LCS is 35 years old this year, so we're one of the few institutions that has been around long enough to talk credibly about the history of the field." - them and me both then - I started programming in 1966. Talking credibly about the history of the field should perhaps include some non-US references - to be UK-centric Enigma, and LEO (the _world's_ first commercial computer) would do for starters.
-- Andy Davies, March 21, 2001
Oracle website still sucks. Acting as a potential customer I wanted to know two simple things:
Looking for that I visited both www.oracle.com and www.oracle.com.pl (Polish Oracle site). After spending about an hour I have not found answers to my questions (on the page describing different versions of Oracle RDBMS I found marketing slogans from which I was unable to deduce what is the difference between Standard and Enterprise).
- what should I buy to run Oracle-backed web application (Apache+perl+DBI, Oracle acting only as RDBMS) with unknown number of users;
- what is the difference between Oracle 8i Standard and Oracle 8i Enterprise.
Fortunately, I am on the spam-list of some Oracle marketing worker (nice person, sends me complete list of all Oracle partners in Poland twice a month as the 'To' field attached to useless messages). So I posted email and fairly quickly got satisfactory replies. Two things seems amazing:
Yes, Oracle can show you how to run e-business and keep clients interested...
- seems the replies were copied from some universally used document (why has not it been put on the Web?);
- she offered me ... participation in the whole-day training about Oracle selling model (I have not asked how much does it cost, I have no time);
- she referred me to alliance.oracle.com - website for registered users (nice, to get info what to buy I should be registered user).
By the way: Oracle is far better than IBM. Three months ago I needed to buy MqSeries. Getting information what exactly should I buy, from whom and for what money costed me 4 weeks, about 20 emails and about 20 phone calls. Not only there was no information on the web. Even IBM workers did not know what should I buy. And I did not want anything special - the questions was: 'I need development and runtime license for single machine MqSeries installation. What would be the cost in case of Windows NT install, what would be the cost in case of Digital Unix install and what should I do to order.'
-- Marcin Kasperski, May 11, 2001
Be scared! Be very scared!! Read the article entitled "MICROSOFT - How it became STRONGER than ever. Will the COURTS make a difference?", in June 4, 2001 issue of e-business supplement to Business Week.
Hey, Phil are you still up for that tire salesman gig? Would love to join you :-)
-- Bakki Kudva, June 7, 2001
Dear Philip, I've been reading a very worthy set of articles on writing for the web for the last several hours (Dr Jakob Nielsen on www.useit.com/alertbox for those who insist). One of his links brought me to your site, and I started your book to see if it too was worth anything (I'm too knackered to read it properly now). Within the first page of chapter one I was smiling and nodding my head (the therapist in me knows how to listen and the programmer in me knows about the user's primacy). And a bit further down, where you were telling the MIT people about what the world will think of their groups, it was a case of LOL. When I got to Jane Nerd and then Joe Maxinerd, it was ROFL time. No doubt about the conclusion - You have been bookmarked!! Congratulations. I look forward to reading more when I get up again. Thanks and goodnight.
-- Fergus Cooney, October 29, 2001