<nettime> Re: Bill Thompson: Dump the World Wide Web

[Curt Cloninger <curt@lab404.com>]

Hi Geert,

Here's an even earlier proclamation of the web's death.  This 
self-aggrandizing piece famously stirred the web design pot back in 
1997:
http://xml.coverpages.org/siegelRuined.html

Written by David Siegel, "father" of presentational (vs. semantic) 
web design -- early advocate of table-based layouts, inventor of the 
single pixel transparent gif hack, author of  *Creating Killer Web 
Sites* -- basically admitting that CSS promises to solve all the HTML 
limitations he originally had to fudge around.  Now he's out of the 
game entirely:  http://dsiegel.blogs.com/about.html

Also applicable to the "Decade of Web Design" dialogue is this 
article I wrote in 2000 on the design vs. usability wars in the US:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/marsvenus/

peace,
curt

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

geert wrote:

Yes, you are right. But what stroke me most is the very idea that one can,
still, question the basic architecture and existence of WWW. One can say,
that's naive, but it's also good news. The very fact that protocols are
not God-given is not clear to most Internet users, I bet. The proposal
that the WWW can be dumped, must come as a surprise as most of the
technologies, once they are around for a number of years, sink down to
some level of the collective subconcious. HTML might be a nightmare for
designers, but who cares about them? Neither users nor Berners-Lee, so it
seems.

I posted the piece primarily because we're doing this Decade of Webdesign
conference in a couple of weeks here in Amsterdam
(www.decadeofwebdesign.org) where topics like this will discussed.

Greetings, Geert


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