My suggested move to the CMS was seen as a double threat: an attack on the fundamental nature of the web, and on the role of web designer. This was never my intention. I believe that the HTML web page and the page-focused web designer are here to stay, because the web wouldn’t work without them.
However, that’s a different question from asking the best way to create those pages. Web designers must be prepared to adapt, to accept that the static page-based publishing model has passed its sell-by date. Once this – and the reasons why –is appreciated, I think designers will come to view the CMS in a far more positive light. So, what’s wrong with the traditional model?
Web 0.0: content is king
First, you have to realise that the web wasn’t actually meant to be built this way. When Tim Berners-Lee came up with HTML, he wasn’t – as web designers often assume – trying to invent the ideal modern publishing medium.
In fact, design didn’t figure at all as he was solely concerned with content. In particular, he was focused on helping his employers at CERN solve a key problem – the information loss that accompanies staff turnover. The result was a simplified, presentation-independent, collaborative CMS, or a “universal linked information system”.
When Tim Berners-Lee came up with HTML, he wasn’t – as web designers often assume – trying to invent the ideal modern publishing medium.
An excellent demonstration of how successful he was in this mission is that we still have web-based access to his original thoughts about the web and, in particular, on how web pages should be created.
Interestingly enough, dedicated HTML-authoring packages and the create-and-post publishing model are notable by their absence from his list of suggested methods.
Indeed elsewhere, he says “you can, if you really want to, make your own hypertext documents using a mark-up language” with the implication that, rather than being natural, such an approach would be almost perverse.
Instead, he saw the web as “a collaborative medium, a place where we all meet and read and write”, and key to such read/write handling was the fact that web page authoring would be undertaken directly in the browser. To achieve this, the first ever web client, Berners-Lee’s own WorldWideWeb, was designed to act as a “hypertext browser editor”.
Using WorldWideWeb, you could select text in any of your existing pages and hit the “Link to New” command to simultaneously create a hyperlink and new page, which was far simpler and more efficient than creating pages separately.
It was just as easy to tag your content to create the new page as HTML was deliberately built around only a few structural tags, for marking up headings, lists, quotes and so on, specifically to avoid the need for complex authoring packages.
Web 1.0: static publishing
The next question is: why did this in-browser editing model not take off? The short answer is that it wasn’t given the chance, because WorldWideWeb was available only for Steve Jobs’ esoteric NeXT system. It was the mass-market Macintosh and Windows that prospered, and their Mosaic and Netscape Navigator browsers were read-only.
With content consumption now the focus, design moved centre-stage. Berners-Lee’s approach worked if you were happy for your web page to look like everyone else’s, and to be connected and accessed via a single drill-through link, but the first generation of web content creators wanted more.
They wanted to create sites with a recognisable brand identity, not merely a collection of indistinguishable pages.
They wanted to create sites with a recognisable brand identity, not merely a collection of indistinguishable pages.
This could be done with HTML by using img tags for graphics and graphical navigation, table tags for multi-column layouts, and font tags for crude typographic control, but this was too much to expect of a browser-editor, or even Notepad.
A solution arrived in the shape of dedicated HTML authoring applications such as CyberStudio/GoLive, FrontPage and, of course, Dreamweaver. These tools made the familiar static page-based publishing model, and the professional web designer, dominant and central to the Web 1.0 explosion. Together they enabled the web to become a much richer medium, stretching far beyond universities and research institutes, sparking the first dotcom boom and entering the mainstream.
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