The internet has become a larger collection of crap than it was ever
intended to become.
Who remembers the days when computers filled entire rooms, and the
internet was a simple protocol that made one computer say "hi"
to another? I for one, dont, and maybe that's the problem...
These days there are web sites for everything under the sun. You've
got your cheesy happy personal
or family
sites, your gaming sites, your
porn sites, e/n sites, and your porn/gore/japscat
sites. There's your typical rant site, where all you hear about is
someone's day at school or work, or their lack of life as they sit in
front of their computer screen for twenty hours out of the day. Or
how about furniture
porn? What
were they thinking when they made this type of resource available to the
masses?Originally, the 'net was designed as a way to communicate
information. There was no photo galleries of someone's three legged
dog, or the dad
haters' personal web page. The internet is all about
information. Period. Or is it? When microsoft
made it big, the internet was not a household name. No one really
saw a practical reason for having it in the home. Sure, universities
of scientists would use it, but can you think of a better way to allow
access to information anywhere?
I remember when in seventh grade, my school started putting computers into
the library and classrooms. Cheesy Macs, some which even had
black&white monitors, and we thought they were the greatest things on
the face of the planet. They held classes there at night so as to
teach parents how to use them. My mom went to those classes. It
wasn't until I got to high school that I even saw a computer that was
hooked up to the internet. Even the computers in the library didn't
run in windows until recently.
rapidly it was becoming necessary to own a computer, if just for school
even. I actually had problems at school because I didn't have
one...But anyway, I'm moving away from the point...
In today's culture, is acceptable for a family to own a computer. Hell, its mandatory.
In reality, ill bet a bunch of you out there
have more than one in your house. A computer has become the coffee
table, and the internet has become the coffee. Everyone wanted to be
able to access the internet. So they made "modems". My first modem was a 200 baud modem.
Now my 56.6k modem is, in my
opinion, too slow. And now I want a cable modem. Or maybe a
satellite modem. Of course, true to the american way, companies decided to
make even more money by making it possible for people to actually
"own" a website. Now your company can be on the web for all
to see!...But eventually this wasn't enough, either. People started
making sites for their own personal benefit. And it all went
downhill from there.
Then came places like geocities, angelfire,
topcities, and yahoo.
Now, not only could you have your own website, but now you could have one
for free! From here on in, everyone and their
mom made a
website. If you were to sample even a small portion of them, you
would find millions of sites where there is no such thing as a frame or
even a table. Preformatted layouts so you dont need to set a
background, blue links and black text. Hi, may name is ________ I'm
from _________ and welcome to my web page. Then it'll contain a bunch
of links about his/her favorite tv shows, or maybe some pictures of their
little fur ball of a dog. Where is the development? Where is
the information? Where is the need?
That was the breaking point. Suddenly, sites were turning up with
better layouts, but only slightly better content. every once in a
while one of those would break free of the group and move on to become
popular, due to a successful layout, or maybe some good content. But
most of the time, that's just not the case.
These days the web consists of search
engines, e/n sites and porn. Oh yeah, and mp3
sites. Now it is becoming necessary to watch what you say on
your web page, too. there are five kids in my town, who, over the
past two or three years, were arrested because they said on a web page
that they would kill someone. Can no one go unpunished for their opinion?
The W3C has been altering
html to suit the needs of the web and its inhabitants. And what is
that? Design. First the ability to add audio and video, and
now its come to Cascading Style Sheets. Now you can even totally
alter the way a font displays, so as to make the layout look better,
without the use of gifs or jpgs. As if that wasn't enough for ya,
then how about font
embedding? The web has become a haven for designers,
and would-be designers all over the planet. And hacks.
Everywhere you go is a site ripping off another, and trying to claim their
piece of the pie for their "original" layout, with their superb
content, and their cool-as-hell links that everyone should know about,
since they're so cool that no one knew they existed before then. Its
so tired. The web is being stretched to its limits. When you
register a site, the hosting company usually requests that you do no create a sub domain (yoursite.someoneelsessite.com)
because ip's are a limited thing, and we are running out. I have
already seen sites that start off with www2. And what happens then?
The goal of a web-designer is, or, rather, should be, to create
something so amazing that it can be considered a work of art,
by including intelligent
content with a successful, original
layout. It would seem that that is something we lack very much these
days...
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Have
you been watching the news recently?