![]() ![]() The earliest cars and components were individually crafted, which led to many safety and maintainability nightmares. The Industrial Revolution brought about interchangeable parts and Henry Ford’s assembly line forever transformed the automobile manufacturing process. Modularity predates the web by a long shot. And there’s one concept that keeps popping up in every conversation about how to make successful web experiences: modularity. Thankfully, the web community is hard at work establishing principles and practices to help us effectively talk about and create for the web. But to build thoughtful interfaces meant to be served to a multitude of connected devices, the time has come for us to evolve beyond the page. The page metaphor has served its purpose helping users familiarize themselves with the web, and provided creators with the necessary transitional language with which to create for a brand new medium. Ultimately, a project’s level of effort is much better determined by the functionality and components contained within those pages, rather than on the quantity of pages themselves. In that case, maybe the homepage will take several months to complete.Īs for the 30,000-page university website, it might be tempting to declare, “Thousands of pages?! Wow, that sounds challenging!” But in reality, those 30,000 pages may consist of three content types and two overarching layouts. Or maybe it’s chock-full of carousels, dynamic forms, and third-party integrations. How long will a homepage take to build? Well, that sort of depends on what’s on it, right? Maybe the homepage simply consists of a tagline and a background image, which means it could be done by lunch. As soon as we come to terms with this fact, the notion of the page quickly erodes as a useful means to scope and create web experiences. The reality is that the web is a fluid, interactive, interdependent medium. “How are we ever going to redesign this university website that contains over 30,000 pages?!”Īll of the statements above make the fundamental mistake of assuming a page is a uniform, isolated, quantifiable thing. “Brad, how long will the home page take to build?” “We’re a startup looking to launch a five- page website this October…” Here are just a few examples I hear on a regular basis: Unfortunately, the page metaphor continues to run deep with respect to how we scope and execute our web projects. But even though these brochure websites offered a very one-dimensional perspective of what the web could offer, viewing websites as digital representations of the printed page was easy for creators to wrap their heads around.īut we’re now 25 years into this new medium, and this once necessary figure of speech has overstayed its welcome. ![]() In the early days of the web, companies looking to get online simply translated their printed materials onto their websites. It also has a profound influence on how web experiences are created. The page was – and continues to be – a very visible and helpful metaphor for the users of the web. Concepts like bookmarking and pagination helped new web users explore and eventually master an entirely new medium using conventions they were already comfortable with.Ĭhrome browser displaying ‘This webpage is not available Thinking of the web as pages has real ramifications on how people interact with web experiences, and influences how we go about creating web interfaces.įrom the beginning, the page metaphor provided users with a familiar language with which to navigate this brave new World Wide Web. This document-based, academic genesis of the web is why the concept of the page is so deeply ingrained in the vocabulary of the internet.Īs we’ll discuss throughout this book, the way things are named very much impacts how they’re perceived and utilized. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web so that he, his colleagues at CERN, and other academics could easily share and link together their world of documents. The page metaphor has been baked into the lexicon of the web since the very beginning. And while reading technology has come a long way – from papyrus to parchment to paperback to pixels – the concept of the page holds strong to this day. The first books were thick slabs of clay created about 4,000 years ago, soon replaced by scrolls as the preferred way to consume the written word. The page has been with us for a long time now. I’m so glad these book things with their razor-sharp pages aren’t around anymore. You turned them, and they cut your fingers.Īwful things. Inside these books were things called pages. Remember them? These contraptions were heavy and bulky and made from the pulp of dead trees. A long, long time ago, there were these things called books. ![]()
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