Matthew LaVelle’s weblog

DigitalWeb has become my favorite site on the internet. Web 2.0 for Designers is the first half of their double-column this week, and it’s a doozie! If you are a web designer you need to read this article. My head is still spinning from my first encounter with it. I had to write about it now while my thoughts are fresh. I’m on lunch break right now so I’ll try to make this quick.

To sum up this article I’ll just say, look out web designers! Things are going to change, again. I’m not part of the 20th century breed of web designer that this article refers to often. Here’s some tell tale signs of a 20th century web designer from Web1.0:

• Nested Tables: Oh boy! That’s the big one! It wasn’t a bad thing then. This is just what was available and supported across popular browsers of the time like Netscape 4.7 and IE 4 through 5.0.


• Using HTML for style and content: This was an era ruled by the FONT tag. I will say no more.

I’m part of what I’d call the second period in the Golden Age of Web1.0. There are many differences between what I was taught in school and what 20th century designers were taught:

• XHTML: XHTML is more or less a transtioning language that allows 21st century web designers to get things ready for Web2.0 and XML. If you think you know nothing about XML you couldn’t be more worng. XHTML is XML. Well, part of it. To put it simply XHTML is to XML like HTML is to SGML.


• Separation of style and content: Enter CSS. Cascading Style Sheets allow web designers to separate style and structure. This was huge. This is the way I was trained to design web sites.


• DIV: Replacing tables, divs when combined with CSS allowed designers to take a different approch to building web pages. This was a hard transition for lots of 20th century designers and some still have not converted. Those designers will find themselves in deeper trouble once Web2.0 starts to take root.

So now we have the upcoming Web2.0. This is what I was taught in school would eventually happen. It’s scary, I admit it, but I’m ready to start re-learning too. Some of the points made in the article were interesting and very thought provoking. I remember when I first read this: I had to go back and rereas this article since I’m finishing up this post now. There was a lot to take in and a lot that scares me. One of the unmentioned themes in this article was the end of what we call the web browser. I’m not sure if it’s coming up very soon but it will change a lot in the next couple of years.

Web Designers have lots to learn all of the time. But when you’re a web designer, solving problems is only half the battle. Every so often there is a shift in the way everything works online. So, what happens is that we have to re-learn everything. This is the very cool and very tough thing about being a web designer, developer, or even programmer for that matter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 8th, 2005 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Geek Speak. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.