Excluding The Common Web Designer
Clint Lewis, CI Editor
To me, one of the most interesting consequences of the introduction of the
World Wide Web to the general public a decade ago was the ease with which the
non-technical could join the party. Everyone and his or her brother could
become a web producer. Huge amounts of pent-up creative energy was let loose
upon the world as non-programmers bought FrontPage, NetObjects Fusion, Dreamweaver,
or some other easy-to-use web page creation tool and learned how to build their
own websites.
The introduction of "drug-store" web programmers into a realm that
had been the exclusive domain of the "serious programmer" was and
still is an interesting study in human nature. There was a lot of programmer
"hurummphing" going on as companies like Microsoft and their ISP
buddies made it easier and easier to mask the complexity of the technology in
favor of making it easy for the man or woman on the street to communicate their
web fantasies to others. And many of those fantasies were worth communicating.
But alas, the original anarchistic, open spirit of the new digital times began
to fade. As millions of cheap clip art images, tacky home photos, and zany
flashing text strings were deployed to <YourNameGoesHere>'s Personal
Websites, the commercial folks began to play in earnest. They designed
sophisticated websites with shopping carts, airbrushed images, credit card
processing capabilities, and databases that remembered who you were. Along
behind them came the tax collectors and the other regulators who felt it their
republic-given right to collect taxes and impose regulations upon the wide-open
public discourse that was the web. But I digress.
As the function/design bar was raised on web pages and as one-to-many
communication mechanisms like Napster emerged, the excitement of newbie web
page designs began to fade from the scene. I mean, how could the hunchbacks,
the huddled masses of the web world hope to compete with the golden gods of
programming and design?
Nailing the coffin of everyman's spontaneous creative urges shut, we now have
Microsoft's new .NET architecture arriving on the scene. What was surmountable
by the new, tender web designer - a little VB script, a little database
connectivity - is to be supplanted by a new level of sophistication suitable to
real programmers. Now we have real engines for web interactivity: VB, and
scaring even the comfortable VB programmers, C#!
"Good!" say many of those disgruntled and displaced by the newbie
invasion of webbites over the last decade. It's about time we put technology
back into web page creation - isn't it?