How the standards took the fun out of webdesign
What will happen if you leave thirty teenagers unsupervised in a computer lab one hour every day for a year?
History and statistics will tell you that the students will surf the net, login to social networking sites, or play online games. (Your own high school experience will also tell you that they will spend the last 3 days before finals week cramming a ‘personal site’ they were supposed to be working on the whole year.) What history or statistics wouldn’t tell you is that one of those thirty students will Google ‘HTML, CSS, Javascript’ and, despite the odds, will be interested in the search results.
Statisticians will call the deviating student an outlier. My brother will simply call the student sira-ulo or brain-damaged.
Five years after that fateful Google search and he still calls me that. Wouldn’t you know it? This is my webdesigning story.
Comsci lab imprisonment
-– that’s how my early love for web design started in 2004: long before most people knew CSS can be used to change their friendster account’s background image, long before being a computer geek or having multiple, white, shiny, overpriced gadgets gave you godlike status. It was the dark ages. There wasn’t much to talk about yet. There wasn’t anyone to talk to about it anyway.
That was the happiest phase of my webdesigning career. If you were in the same stage around 2004, I bet:
You shared my fascination with DDG or one of its affiliates: digik.net, aethereality.net, magitek-designs, and their liberal terms on layout sharing and use (free for personal or commercial use – just keep the link back to DDG!)
You also downloaded said layouts for purposes other than actual use in your freewebs hosting account. These “anything-but” uses may include (but are not limited to):
- html reference
- css reference
- how-he-did-that-pop-up-menu reference
- how-he-made-that-iframe-align-right reference
- how-he-made-that-link-turn-all-caps-on-hover reference
- how-he-changed-the-mouse-cursor reference
… and so on.
You thought you died and went to heaven when you saw the Aethereality gallery and its huge collection of anime scans (not to mention Ivy’s high-quality extracted PNGs: free for making wallpapers/layouts from – just don’t forget to credit back!)
You stalked people such as Rilla, Miko-reznor, and danielhatcher because they made great, not-average-DDG-level designs or wrote coding tutorials that actually made sense (and provided downloadable, installable copies of their code if you were too nooby to follow their tutorials – just add a line back to them in your credits page!)
If you weren’t “there” back in 2004, you’d wonder why I called that the happiest part of my ‘webdesigning experience’. I made crappy iframe layouts and table-based designs that got 400+ downloads and 4.3 ratings. An ego-search for my DDG username brought up ten or more freewebs hosted sites that used one of said not-validated layouts. I got emails about how someone ‘ripped off’ my design and made an EVEN crappier version of my crappy masterpiece – a feat worthy of its own Guinness record. I had applications for affiliation in varying levels of rejection and acceptance. I received hate mail and the “it’s-my-site-I’ll-keep-it-like-that-butt-off” comment for answering someone’s question on how to improve their site. I got requests for custom-made layouts and forum signatures/avatars. Towards the end of that phase I even got as high up as a moderator in the Aethereality forums… in short, I was hated AND loved – like Britney Spears sans Ked Federline. It was hectic and weird but doing those things tickled me to death.
One boring day, I saw a “VALID XHTML” link in one of Pange’s layouts and got curious. I followed the hyperlink…
WHAM! What followed was terabytes of blog posts, forum posts, and barely-disguised lectures on how tables are bad for layouting. How using javascript is annoying for users and should be avoided at all costs (remember, this was way before AJAX/jQuery became popular in my circle). How we should use divs instead because divs, coupled with the right CSS, can do anything! They can float, they can hide, display inline, display as a block, be bordered, margined, padded to your heart’s (or page’s) content! How we shouldn’t design for IE because IE doesn’t implement the standards as it should. How using celebrity photos (unless I took them myself) or manga scans/ anime screencaps in my designs were illegal and Very Bad.
It was information overload. It was informative but it didn’t help me. I am the type of person who would rather not do anything than fail at something. And the new knowledge was telling me: “What you were doing before, it was wrong. We don’t give a shit if it made you and others happy. That happiness was wrong. It didn’t conform to The Standards…”
So I stopped. I told myself it was temporary… just until I learned how to make table-less layouts, just until I learned to design for Firefox, just until I was good enough of an artist not to use celebrity photos or manga scans. In fairness to myself, I did learn to make table-less layouts but it still takes hours to hack divs into position with the float, clear, and display attributes in CSS. I was able to design for Firefox, but now the layouts look like crap in IE. I was able to restrain myself from using the cutest manga scans/un-credited artwork in my designs, but I look at the design and see something more lifeless than the Photoshop-murdered-faces-of-Harry-Potter in my distant past.
Webdesigning became a chore. It felt like I was designing for the standards instead of the click-and-download-happy audience I used to love at DDG or Cruiza. Nowadays, I look at some designs at DDG, convinced that, with my ‘terabyte-knowledge’ I could do better and give the members something they’d love, but I couldn’t. Because I know that it wouldn’t be standard to hack tables into the design I’m envisioning… So now I’m reduced to a wordpress blog installation with a wptheme that isn’t even mine, writing for my three readers (Hi, mom!) about emo-webdesigning issues. God forbid I discover that there is a convention or standard for writing, lest one boring day, I find a hyperlink leading to it…
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Disclaimer: I am not against the standards or the “worldwideweb-wide” effort to standardize. I am just saying how, for me, being told what NOT to do has actually stopped me from trying to do anything at all. I am still for separating mark-up and style… and abolishing IE, of course. 