Web-design as a technodicy

15/03/01

Let me state this clear: nobody except the company CEO is interested in repeated viewing of a spinning, slashing, color-changing, strobe-lit version of the company logo.
J. Davis Eisenberg, SVG Essentials

Introduction and theodicies

Let's start with the example of the theodicy: When he created the world, God made it the best by generosity and the simplest by wisdom. Later, when thinkers and philosophers recall that fact, they are divided in two sides:

The classics think the world is the best possible, beyond strict understanding, because it's simplicity is the ultimate virtue.
The classics are somehow contemplative and believe that what can be improved is only the perception of that marvelous world God created. They refuse to admit the possibility of miracles because that would be an infrigment of the divine simplicity of the world and it's rules.
The baroques think of simplicity as a single parameter that can be modulated in order to conceive an even better world, even if it makes it more complicate.
Baroques are ready to commit to the complexification of the world in order to have an even better one than God wanted. They are open to forward thinking and acting and see miracles as path to that even better world.

Baroques and the web design technodicy

Although strict basic HTML has a friendly simplicity, we must move forward to some sort of DXHTML4, and today, web design without javascript and flash is a joke. Statistics from our sites indicate that more than 90% of our visitors use last generation browser, so we must answer to that large majority and adopt all the latest technologies, standards and protocols, to stay on the edge and maybe forward. We must sacrifice universality of access in the name of technological improvement. In the sake of a better world, we are ready to use a more complicated HTML code, through authoring software if needed. We let the democracy of web logs speak. If Netscape goes below 10% of the audience, that would be cool because then we won't test our code with this piece of technological crap. Further more, the laws of the market will make what remains of that old technology a desert out of the picture, a nasty place to be overhelmed by a tide wave of new technics.

Classics and the web design technodicy

The main goal of the web is it's universality, the magical fact that a document is readable anywhere on any machine, platform, operating system. Staying true to the HTML 3.2 norm (or even less) is an healthy policy. Javascript can be used but must absolutly remain optional and alternate navigation paths must be provided. Large scale statistics show that about 20% of the visitors don't have or desactivate javascript. Figures might be even higher, considering the fact that people stuck out of a site because of the lack of javascript or a plug-in will leave and may never come back. To optimize a site for a certain browser (IE or Netscape), under a specific OS, with a specific screen resolution is absurd because the ultimate power of the web is it's divine universality. The little percents, neglected by the Baroques, are the deep proof of that principle.

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.
Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996