Weave style into your Website

New Straits Times
02-28-2001
Weave style into your Website
Edition: The City Advertiser; 2*
Section: Literary & Books
Column: Leong Pe Loon's microword
Type: Book review

THE Internet began life as the ARPANET. Its concept was born of the vision of JCR Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology way back in 1962 when he saw in his mind's eye a "Galactic Network" of globally connected computers where data can be accessed from any site.

When the necessary technologies permitted it, the first remote connection was made between computers in the research laboratories of MIT and Stanford University in 1969, and we know what the rest is.
One of the technologies which made the Internet possible was "packet switching".

Traditional circuit switched telephone systems which transfer information between end-to-end connections in sequence were totally inadequate for the ARPANET.

In contrast, the more efficient packet switching technology breaks long messages into small "packets" of information before they are despatched. These packets take the best available route along the network, which means they may end up taking different paths to reach their destination.

What's more, the packets may be received at different times and thus out of sequence; the receiving computer must then be equipped with the necessary intelligence to reassemble the packets in the correct order to recreate the original message.

With packet switching, therefore, two computers in a network can remain connected regardless of breaks in the network, certainly a more efficient way to transmit data.

At the height of the Cold War, the Pentagon saw in the ARPANET a technology which offered the opportunity to keep communication channels open in the event of war.

As a result, the military played a pivotal role in developing the network into what we know today as the Internet. But that's another story.

As it was wrought of such high-tech, it's understandable that when the World Wide Web came into existence in the early 1990s, only the technologically inclined were around to design the first webpages.

Until then, documents on the Internet could only be in plain text, and transmitted on now-archaic services such as FTP and Gopher. Without graphics and layout possibilities, presentation of the documents was never an issue.

Thus first-generation websites, says David Siegel, author of Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design (Hayden Books, 305 pages), were linear and bare-bones functional. Pages displayed top to bottom, left to right, interspersed with bullets and horizontal lines.

Second-generation sites saw icons replacing words, tiled images instead of grey background, buttons with bevelled edges, and banners where headlines used to be.

We're now at the third generation of website architecture. This time, it's driven by design rather than technology.

Third-generation sites, according to Siegel, "pull visitors through using metaphors and well-known models of consumer psychology".

Third-generation site developers entice the audience to surf through clever design, turning a site from a menu into a meal. From the point of view of designers, what differentiates third-generation sites from the second is the degree of control they have over their pages.

This second edition of a book which the author unabashedly claims to have taught an entire generation of Web designers to produce third- generation sites is pretty dated by the standards of this industry.

Written in 1997 the browsers and software tools referred to are way past their prime.

Ultimately, however, this is immaterial. What matters, and is so unforgivable, is the obsessive flogging of the author's outdated single- pixel GIF trick (to provide designers the ability to position webpage components with precision) which had been superseded by more sophisticated tools even before this second edition was written.

Otherwise exquisitely designed and printed, there's no doubt Siegel puts into practice what he preaches where style is concerned. The book really takes off in Part II where readers are shown the practical aspects of website design and construction.

Chapters on a makeover of a webpage and the creation of a cyber storefront from scratch offer readers an intimate view of how the pros do it.

Part I covers what are essentially the building blocks of webpage construction, like rendering fonts, page layout, and preparing images for display on the Web - stuff any designer ready for this book must already be familiar with to a large degree.

No doubt about it, Siegel's designs rock, as can be discerned from the portions of the book where we see how the author applies his creations to produce webpages that put ours, and thousands of others, to shame.

The reader who isn't impressed with Siegel's prowess as an unusually gifted designer just by flicking through the book shouldn't buy it, for that's the essence of the appeal of the book and what there is to learn from it.

Although it'd still have much to offer those already well-steeped in the artistic aspect of webpage construction, the book's real value is what it can teach those with no inkling of what constitutes good taste in design and layout.

To follow the book to the letter, one has to possess more than a passing acquaintance with Adobe Photoshop, the undisputed market leader in raster graphics drawing and manipulation software.

At times, it even reads like an advanced Photoshop manual, sans the detailed instructions necessary for those without a background in the software.

At the very least, an understanding of the intricacies of creating computer artwork, regardless of the software used, is required. Just as necessary is reasonable command of HTML, the lingua franca of the Web.

As any self-respecting Web builder will tell you that the only way to build webpages is to do it by hand, not using tools like Microsoft Frontpage, which, in addition to being inefficient, code-wise, do not offer the degree of control demanded by the true pro.

Siegel expounds strong opinions, but his verve makes it tolerable. There are the seven Deadly Sins and myriads of other less morbid ones to avoid at all costs.

Indents separate paragraphs, not blank lines; drop shadows aren't just black, they darken the tones of the surfaces they fall on; background images do more damage to webpages than almost anything else; having two spaces to separate sentences is propagated by old secretaries who become typing teachers. The cogent illustrations he uses to support his arguments are beyond reproach.

The impending fourth-generation webpage architecture seems set to hand the steering wheel back to artistically-challenged techies. Tools such as style sheets, XML and Javascript will commandeer the database-driven and interactive content of the webpage of the next wave.

The sense of style brought about by good design, however, is everlasting and will never be outmoded. Before David Siegel publishes the sequel to this book, as promised, we could do worse than to learn to spin some style into the Web that we weave.

(Copyright 2001)