Form versus Function in the History of the World Wide Web

INTRODUCTION
According to an article in the Atlantic Monthly, the World Wide Web had its beginnings in 1945. Another documented source credits the invention of the web to much earlier times and attributes it to having its roots in the telephone and telegraph industry.

But the consensus is that the official year is 1989 when its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for managing the communication and sharing of information. That is credited for being the beginning of the World Wide Web.

BUILDING BLOCKS
The beginnings of the World Wide Web as we know it became a reality with the invention of the four necessary building blocks: HTML, the Web protocol HTTP, a Web server and a basic browser.

Out of the necessity for establishing some sort of guidelines and protocols, a volunteer organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established in 1994. It made its home at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and had the responsibility for developing and maintaining common standards.

“They set HTML as the standard for marking up web pages. This discouraged any single company from building a proprietary browser and programming language, which could have had a detrimental effect on the web as a whole. The W3C continues to set standards for open web markup and programming languages (such as JavaScript).”1

This type of protocol was not new to the design industries. They had long histories of standards that went back centuries. But design had not come on the scene yet. That was to take a bit more time.

THE WEB IN THE HANDS OF SCIENCE
The changes that have taken place in the 20-year history of the World Wide Web are staggering. The original database was composed of huge amounts of information and its success was based upon that information being accessible to others. At that point, the web belonged to the scientists, academia and industry.

Design, designers and developers had no part in it, as its function required no visual information only listings and sharing of data. Additionally, even to this day there are still those who feel that design, visual imagery, and typography are superfluous to the Web.

But that was all to change when it became apparent that much more could be done with the web than simply storing and sharing data. “Perhaps the single most important technological development in the history of the web, besides the creation of the web itself, was the development of graphical browsers in the early 90s.”

“Beginning with NCSA’s Mosaic and its evolution into Netscape’s Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, these programs allowed users to browse the resources on the web in an extremely user friendly environment. This made the web a “fun” place and marked the beginning of the true web revolution.”2

“Soon the Web took on a commercial flavor, as cybermalls opened and closed, Yahoo became the major directory of Web sites and Amazon.com Inc. started selling books and music CDs.”3

THE WEB IN THE HANDS OF DESIGNERS
With the evolution of the web and its growing functions, it became essential to create systems of organization or tables that allowed for visual material as well as all the additional technology that had become part of the mainstream of the web. Table-based designs grew in complexity, incorporating sliced-up background images, often giving the illusion of a simpler structure than the actual table layout.

DESIGN OVER STRUCTURE
“This era of web layouts paid little attention to semantics and web accessibility, often opting for aesthetics over good markup structure. This was the same era where Spacer GIFs were popularized to control whitespace of web layouts. Some major companies even educated designers about the Spacer GIF; see Introducing the spacer GIF for use in HTML tables on Microsoft.com.”4

“The development of the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web design applications, all of which used table-based layouts, increased the use of tables. In addition, some of those programs created tables so complex that many designers would never have created them from scratch (such as tables with rows only 1-pixel high and hundreds of cells). Designers had to rely on tables if they wanted to create designs that were even mildly complex (such as multi-column designs).”5

THE PENDULUM SWINGS THE OTHER WAY
But as time went on, the technical aspects of a site’s development started to take a front seat again. The requirements that web design and web development had filled again needed to include programming. Features like search engine optimization, shopping carts, and a myriad of other tools that required the use of complex coding began to overshadow the reign of the web design and returned the focus to the web’s internal wiring.

Web designers, who had primarily been graphic designers before the advent of the web, found that much of what web developers, the coders and computer programmers were doing was unappealing visually and was lacking in what they understood to be good design.  Just as the W3C set standards for web language, standards in graphic design had long and deep traditions for the protocols of good design.

HANGING IN THE BALANCE
The web changed all that. Good design alone could not stand on its own when it came to the web. If a site did not do the job it was intended to do, it did and does not matter how visually attractive it is. As one firm puts it, “ Web design is not good web design if the visitor has to ‘think’ about it.”6

A site needs to flow; it needs to be navigated without having to ‘think’ about it. It is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn how, you just do it. You do not ‘think’ about doing it.

FORM AND FUNCTION
There can and needs to be a reasonable meeting ground where form and function co-habitate. This has been the challenge with many other fields of design, to create something functional that is also a thing of beauty. This point can be clearly illustrated by the increasing numbers of extremely successful designers who have carried over their individual brand to everyday products in superstores frequented by everyday folks rather than the wealthy for exclusivity.

QUALITY PREVAILS
Architects like Michael Graves, fashion designers like Vera Wang and Jaclyn Smith, furniture designer, Cindy Crawford, textile/fashion designers like the Missoni Family, and the queen of home making herself, Martha Stewart have all lent their talents to create usable, tasteful, sometimes even works of art that are sold at affordable prices in the American Heartland’s superstores such as Target, Kmart, Wal-Mart and even Kohl’s.

CONCLUSION
The web is the next frontier where form and function initially collided but have learned to coexist. Although it is not always a happy marriage, it is just another day in the world where designers and programmers battle it out to see who has the upper hand for the moment. On some days, it is a standoff and in certain cases, a balance is struck. It is then that the music of the World Wide Web can be heard.

DIRECT REFERENCES
1. The Evolution of Web Design
2. History of the Web
3. The Story So Far: History of Web Sites
4. WYSIWYG
5. The Spacer GIF
6. Web Design vs. Web Development

SOURCES
Web Design & Development Guide: Spacer GIF
History of the Web and HTML
WEB DESIGN HISTORY
Things That Shaped the Web Design Industry in 2010
Several Articles about the Web
Practicing Perfectionism as a Web and Graphic Designer
Top fashion designers go down-market
Missoni for Target
From Towers to Teakettles: Michael Graves Architecture and Design
Target’s Newest Designer: Justin Timberlake!