What is a web page?
Posted on June 25, 2002 @ 11:53 in Webdesign
I just can't stop thinking about this one thing Owen Briggs remarked in a mail: "We haven't defined what a webpage 'looks' like yet." We were talking about fluid and scalable web page designs and then he just drops that one. Says the web is a new medium and right now we're just being bogged down by the thousands of years of print design, which prevents us from thinking outside the box with regard to web page design.
What then is a good example of a web design thinking outside the box? (Disregarding for a moment that of course the center pillar of all layout techniques actually is the Box, whether in html tables, the CSS box model or print in most cases.) Especially, are there any blogs out there that manage to put a fairly rigid type of content in an exciting new design?
I've been visiting hundreds of blogs over the past week or so, but hardly any surprising designs. I've checked out the blogs of the hip, totally CSS and standards aware crowd, of the webdesigners and of the techies, but apart from great attention to detail, fabulous W3C standards compliance, superb scalability and accessibility it's all basic one, two or three column layout. We may not have defined what a web page looks like yet, but they pretty much all look the same. (And this site is no exception...)
Maybe the blog is not the right type of content to spark wild new design, but since it's being hailed as a revolution in web usage, I figured I'd look there first. Which sparks another question: Does the current format of weblogs dictate a certain type of content? Or does the content dictate the design in this case? Or is it simply convention: a weblog is a weblog if and only if you have some sort of column layout with timestamped messages and an archive? If we have trouble thinking about fluid design, as Owen says, does that mean we also have trouble thinking about fluid content? Or is content always fluent and does it flow automatically into the boxes we design? And what is the role of the ingrained use of the spatial metaphor to organise information and information navigation here?
The question then still seems to be not what a web page is, but what a web page can be. Any good links or ideas? Leave a comment! I'm especially interested in blog-type pages that break out of the conventional boundaries.
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