The Virtues of World-Wide Web Inanity,

or,

What's right about the Web as it is

(An anti-rant)

Here's what I seem to be hearing about the Web

The Web must not be allowed to be only for advertising. The Web should be for big, important, works-of-art, things that inspire and delight, that inform and educate, enlighten and give you beautiful transcendent experiences.

It follows that all those people who write "glorified finger files" with the Web are betraying a cause. By doing something that's simple and easy, they're leaving the field to the profiteers. They are enemies of the people, they are misusing or failing to exert their talents, and they must be criticised.

Bah! Bah! and Humbug!

If you insist on high quality - of both content and presentation - as the standard, then the contents of the Web will ultimately boil down to three groups. In order of decreasing size and significance, those will be:

• Corporate and business stuff - all that advertising you hate, slickly produced product literature and annual reports, new services to pay for on impulse, the cyber-shopping channel, slick home pages for important executives - all of it written by PR flacks and professional copywriters, laid out in gorgeous color and style by professional graphic artists, customized by hired programmers.
• Public funded projects - yes, the research corporations and the Universities will continue to have their pages. Maybe PBS will do something slick and polished, and breathlessly educational and inoffensive. Don't look for anything to make you gasp or come.
• A very few amateur artists with well-paying office jobs - does that sound like anyone you know? Most professional artists get paid shit - unless they're doing corporate graphic design - see above. You're narrowing it down to the professional elite, who have enough income or spare time to do some pretty stuff, instead of having to work every minute, and to the even tinier fraction of those who have both good ideas and some graphic talent.

Doing even mediocre Web pages takes time

Here's my yardstick. To do a moderately reasonable version of the current network of pages for my Netcom account is taking me most of three working days*. I only have that much free time because I'm fucking off at work, while I wait for a meeting (and performance review) with my boss, when I'll get some new direction.

I can only get through this in that short a time because:

• I had already learned HTML (It took me a week of fumbling to do my first home page, which was of the despised variety);
• I had already written most of the text content (Most of the writing section came from t.b posts);
• I had already collected most of the graphics I would use (reduced versions of GIFs from the Net, mostly);
• I had decent tools for working with graphics (A limited version of Aldus Photostyler, and some conversion tools);
• I had a fairly reasonable tag editor for HTML (HTML Assistant);
• I can draw, albeit not very well; and, of course,
• I was already familiar with Mosaic and had a system I could run it on.

So what, then?

If you see a lot of boring home pages as you cruise the Web, rejoice! It means there are a lot of people starting to use and write for the Web. Some of them are going to show a talent for it. For every 10 or 20 blah Web authors, one clever and original one will pop up. A medium for everyone is going to share certain characteristics with Usenet. Though the volume of Usenet means there is a lot of stupidity and idiocy, it also means there is a lot of good stuff coming and going.

Moreover, some of those people will eventually do more polished and interesting things. You can see that on Usenet, too. Many people gradually - not overnight - become better writers, better able to articulate arguments, more creative, more openminded. I suspect people's graphic sensibilities will start improving too. The people who are writing boring snapshot and text stuff now are eventually going to write flashier, better integrated documents.

The Web has a further advantage in this: Usenet posts are gone when they're gone, but Web pages hang around. If someone sees that others have qooler stuff in their home pages, he or she may eventually improve it. There's something good to be said for the quest for status.

It's tough to do good Web documents

1. Something worth saying; and
2. A talent for writing.

1. Something worth saying;
2. A talent for writing;
3. Graphics worth showing;
4. A talent for layout; and
5. A knack for weaving it all together.

If you see a page with bad formatting but good ideas, are you offering the author suggestions on improving it? Are you posting suggestions on how to lay out pages? Are you showing how to link things together in a meaningful fashion? Are you giving them some templates to copy? Writing a Web style guide**? Are you helping other people edit their pages? Trying to get the good artists (but sloppy writers) together with the good writers (with no art skills)?

You're not? I didn't think so.

Why not? Could it be that:

• You think your time is worth more than theirs; or that
• You don't really know what is needed yourself; or that
• You haven't gotten around to thinking about how to help?

Welcome to the Net.

NOTA BENE: This is a work in progress. I haven't fully fleshed out my arguments***. You may safely assume that there is more complexity to it than this, even in my own viewpoint.

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