December 07, 2002
Down Memory Lane of Web Design
I’m pretty sure I designed my first webpage over six years ago. I was in seventh grade, and I was a nerd and needed something to do. I’d heard of this great thing called the internet, and I’d even used it a few times. But one day, I received a really interesting cd in the mail. It came with some Mac magazine. I’m pretty sure it was Macworld, but my memory isn’t so good. The cd contained hundreds of websites on it that were considered to be the weirdest sites on the net.
That cd opened a whole new world for me. First, the sites on the cd were great. I remember one of my favorites being a site about kids who were on a mission to travel to every Dennies in the country, and log it on their webpage. And another great one had kids doing a “science experiment” where they tested the length of time it took Spam to go completely rotten. That disc was my first wonderful experience with the world wide web, and I didn’t even have a connection to the internet!
But even more important, I learned something from those sites that will most likely last me my whole life. How to create a website. By viewing the source of the pages, I saw how webpages were put together. It was a funky little markup called HTML. I had no idea what this HTML was, but I quickly realized that all pages had many similar items and that certain tags around text would do certain things to the text contained in those tags.
I soon set out to create my own webpage. I had a text editor, after all, and a copy of Netscape Navigator 2.0. I created a dinky little personal site for myself and did various things on it to learn the ins and outs of creating webpages.
Shortly after, my parents actually hooked us up with the internet. I quickly found a free host in Geocities, who, in thost days, was actually a cool service. I began to explore webdesign to new levels now. And it wasn’t long before I learned of a neat feature called cascading style sheets.
Appearantly, style sheets were a way of seperating your content from your design. And, you could do fancy stuff with them. I hopped onto Webmonkey and learned all I could about this new feature.
I coded some neat stuff in those days, that I wish I still had around. By this time, I was using Internet Explorer 4.0 Mac and it had a fair amount of CSS support. I even created a two column layout with style sheets that worked. Sure, it only supported IE4, but it was still way cooler than tables to me.
I eventually got better at designing webpages and even got paying jobs to make webpages. The jobs were great, but there was a problem. I couldn’t use pure CSS to style my pages anymore. I’d have to use technology that was backwards compatible, so basically straight HTML. It seemed so backwards to use tables again after all those years of laying elements out with pixel precision. I had to use hacks to get items to lay in the corrent spot, rather than just normal CSS.
By entering the corporate world of webdesign, I had to use old methods instead of cutting edge design techniques. Maybe that’s a good thing, but I’m not so sure. And now, it seems that the corporate world is finally catching up with this “cutting edge” technology that was first introduced in 1996. More and more sites are heading the way of CSS layout, with a pioneer being Wired News, and I can only see this as a good thing. Maybe sometime soon, we can forget about creating new hacks to have elements look as desired, and just focus on design. The way I see it, this can only lead to a more beautiful world wide web.
