The
History of Web Design
The first web designer was
Tim Berners-Lee. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and put the first
web site online in 1991. He first combined Internet communication (which had been
carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been
around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer,
such as interactive CD-ROM design).
At first, web design
consisted of using a simple markup language, called HTML, that included some formatting
options, and the ability to link pages together using hyperlinks. It was this
feature that characterized the Web among other communication methods, and characterized
Web design among other design methods. Because of this unique behaviour of the
World Wide Web, and the unique behaviour it encouraged in users, Web design would
prove to be unlike any other form of design before or since.
As
the Web and Web design progressed, the markup language used to make it, known
as HTML, became more complex and flexible. Things like tables, which could be
used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible
layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table based layout
is increasingly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as
server-side scripting (see CGI, PHP, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and ColdFusion) and design
standards like CSS further changed and enhanced the way the Web was made.
The
introduction of Macromedia Flash into an already interactivity-ready scene has
further changed the face of the Web, giving new power to designers and media creators,
and offering new interactivity features to users. Flash is much more restrictive
than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen,
and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back"
button.
Issues
As in all professions, there
are arguments on different ways of doing things. These are a few of the ongoing
ones.
Liquid versus fixed layouts
Programmers
were the original web page designers in the early 1990s. Currently most web designers
come from a graphic artist background in print, where the artist has absolute
control over the size and dimensions of all aspects of the design. On the web
however, the Web designer has no control over several factors, including the size
of the browser window and the size and characteristics of available fonts.
Many
designers compensate for this by wrapping their entire webpage in a fixed width
box, essentially limiting it to an exact pixel-perfect value, which is a fixed
layout. Some create the illusion of liquidity by building the graphics for their
webpage at a size larger than any current standard monitor size. Other designers
say that this is bad because it ignores the preferences of the user, who might
have their browser sized a specific way that they like best. These people propose
a liquid layout, where the size of the Web page adjusts itself based on the size
of the browser window.
There is a usability reason (rather
than wanting control) for why a designer may choose a more fixed layout. Studies
have shown that there is usually an optimal line width in terms of readability.
One rule to appear from such studies is that lines should be between 40-60 characters
long, or approximately 11 words per line. But users may choose their windows size
and font selection to optimize other factors more important to them.
This
decision of which style of layout to use is often made on a case by case basis,
depending on the needs and audience of the website.
Using
Flash in Web Design
Macromedia Flash is a proprietary,
robust graphics animation/application development program used to create and deliver
dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications
over the web via the browser. It is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral
standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet.
Many
graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part
of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up."
Some application designers enjoy flash because it lets them create applications
that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs.
There are many sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash.
Flash
detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use
confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines
have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented sites from having
their contents easily found. It is possible to specify alternate content to be
displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also
helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility
for the page.
The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting
language (called "actionscript", which is an ECMA language similar to
JavaScript) incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the
browser's font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript
2.0 is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design
of class-based web applications.
The final consensus is that
Flash is simply a tool, and like all tools it takes a skillful craftsperson to
know when, and how, to use it properly. Macromedia's other two products, Fireworks
and Dreamweaver, makes Flash integration with graphics and HTML a lot easier.
CSS
versus tables in Web Design
Back
when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular (but now deprecated)
solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often
even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other.
Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique
today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't
used.
After the browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer
dominated the market, designers started turning towards CSS as an alternate, better
means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should only be
used for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns
HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's
going on in a web page. Today, all modern Web browsers now support CSS with different
degrees of limitations.
However, one of the main points against
CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished
as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display.
This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of
CSS codes. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites
in CSS often becomes a matter of replicating what can be done with tables, leading
some to find CSS design rather cumbersome. For example, it is rather difficult
to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length
footers in a design using absolute positions.
These days
most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this
has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, people continue to use
old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind. Most notable among these
old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5 which, according to some web designers,
are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds
the internet back from converting to CSS design.
How it
Looks vs. How it Works
Since so many web developers have
a graphic arts background, they often pay more attention to how a page looks,
without considering how visitors are going to find the page. On the other side
of the issue, search engine optimization consultants (SEOs) obsess about how well
a web site works: how much traffic it generates, and how many sales it makes.
As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer
wants more 'pretty' graphics, and the SEO wants lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text,
bullet lists, and text links.
Dynamic web design
The
traditional method of laying out web pages, Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML)
is static. There are two ways of delivering content dynamically:
Server-side
A
web server, running special software, constructs an HTML page 'on the fly', according
to the user's request and possibly other variables, such as time or stock levels.
Suitable
scripting languages include:
PHP
ASP
JSP
ColdFusion
XSLT
can be used translate data in XML format into HTML.
MySQL
and PostgreSQL are popular free SQL databases, suitable for use with the above.
They can be used to allow users, subject to password access if required,
to update content.
Client-side
Client-side
scripting works at the user's browser, and therefore should not be used for "mission
critical' work, where the user's capabilities are not known -it is more suited
to adding decoration and other ephemeral content. It is most often achieved thorough
JavaScript.
Client side DHTML can pose major problems for
computer accessibility and search engine optimization. Most software designed
for assisting people with disabilities, and most search engine robots do not support
client side DHTML.
If a web site's menus are built with JavaScript,
it is usually impossible for search engines to find the pages listed in the menus,
unless an alternative navigation scheme is provided elsewhere on the page.
See
also
Computer accessibility
Content
management
Faceted navigation
Graphic
design
Information architecture
Interaction
design
Knowledge visualization
Separation
of style and content
Search engine optimization
Server-side
scripting
Web colors
Web development
Web
indexing
Web templates
World Wide Web
Virtual Library
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
CSS
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