The web doesn’t do “age” especially well. Any blog post or design article more than a few years old gets a raised eyebrow—heck, most people I meet haven’t read John Allsopp’s “A Dao of Web Design” or Jeffrey Zeldman’s “To Hell With Bad Browsers,” both as relevant to the web today as when they were first written. Meanwhile, I’ve got books on my shelves older than I am; most of my favorite films came out before I was born; and my iTunes library is riddled with music that’s decades, if not centuries, old.
(No, I don’t get invited to many parties. Why do you ask oh I get it)
So! It’s probably easy to look at “Pocket-Sized Design,” a lovely article by Jorunn Newth and Elika Etemad that just turned 10 years old, and immediately notice where it’s beginning to show its age. Written at a time when few sites were standards-compliant, and even fewer still were mobile-friendly, Newth and Etemad were urging us to think about life beyond the desktop. And when I first re-read it, it’s easy to chuckle at the points that feel like they’re from another age: there’s plenty of talk of screens that are “only 120-pixels wide”; of inputs driven by stylus, rather than touch; and of using the now-basically-defunct handheld media type for your CSS. Seems a bit quaint, right?
And yet.
Looking past a few of the details, it’s remarkable how well the article’s aged. Modern users may (or may not) manually “turn off in-line image loading,” but they may choose to use a mobile browser that dramatically compresses your images. We may scoff at the idea of someone browsing with a stylus, but handheld video game consoles are impossibly popular when it comes to browsing the web. And while there’s plenty of excitement in our industry for the latest versions of iOS and Android, running on the latest hardware, most of the web’s growth is happening on cheaper hardware, over slower networks (PDF), and via slim data plans—so yes, 10 years on, it’s still true that “downloading to the device is likely to be [expensive], the processors are slow, and the memory is limited.”
In the face of all of that, what I love about Newth and Etemad’s article is just how sensible their solutions are. Rather than suggesting slimmed-down mobile sites, or investing in some device detection library, they take a decidedly standards-focused approach:
Linearizing the page into one column works best when the underlying document structure has been designed for it. Structuring the document according to this logic ensures that the page organization makes sense not only in Opera for handhelds, but also in non-CSS browsers on both small devices and the desktop, in voice browsers, and in terminal-window browsers like Lynx.
In other words, by thinking about the needs of the small screen first, you can layer on more complexity from there. And if you’re hearing shades of mobile first and progressive enhancement here, you’d be right: they’re treating their markup—their content—as a foundation, and gently layering styles atop it to make it accessible to more devices, more places than ever before.
So, no: we aren’t using @media handheld or display: none for our small screen-friendly styles—but I don’t think that’s really the point of Newth and Etemad’s essay. Instead, they’re putting forward a process, a framework for designing beyond the desktop. What they’re arguing is for a truly device-agnostic approach to designing for the web, one that’s as relevant today as it was a decade ago.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Sure, the internet doesn’t do age well, but we as a society don’t generally do that either. Sure, you might have some old books or records (I do too), but libraries and museums are filled with stacks of books and art and material of all kinds that no one has looked at in ages. How many magazine articles have ever been worth rereading a year after they were published? Why should you expect the web to be different?
Thanks for reading, Abigail. To your question, I might recommend you to Allen Tan’s excellent “Gardens, Not Graves”. In it, he talks about the different rates at which publications age, both fast—as you say—and slow.
And I agree with Allen’s assessment: the web hasn’t really figured out that “slow” part yet. We don’t really have a good model for archiving on the web, for preserving a sense of history—that’s what I was trying to allude to in my intro.
there are no any age of internet. according to modern human thing. colorful designing need. some body like simple web design in white and black.
It’s expressed well. When there are books, art pieces etc. worth re-examining, which existed ages before, most of these are articulated or done in webpages now. For that, it’s pertinent to keep the spectators engaged to the virtual world, by keeping website designing and logo designing extremely attractive and user friendly, and at the same time, providing relevant and refined content. Websites in the present day are doing what books and other media used to do before. In fact, websites do more that the archives, as there are possibilities for reaching out to more.