Imagine that the colour of your eyes effected what your saw. So blue eyes saw the same thing differently to brown eyes and green eyes saw it differently too. They would all see basically the same view, but with differences, unique to each. The design could effect what they saw: Make an error and blue eyes wouldn't be able to see half of what you printed but brown eyes could see all of it and green eyes most of it.

Think how it really is. Apart from the partially sighted and the blind you can pretty much guarantee that anything you print on paper will be the same for everyone.

Now look at browsers. Netscape Navigator is blue eyes, MS Internet Explorer is brown eyes and Lynx is green eyes. Everybody sees web pages slightly differently - they're running different resolutions, monitor sizes, operating systems etc. All I can be sure of is that you'll see this text and the links. That makes design pretty hard.

I'm really into the cross-platform nature of the Net. Which is my pages are a bit more sparse than the jazzier Shockwaved sites. Why? Because I know that 99% of people viewing my site will be able to see all the content reliably. You can get to anything with text links here. Some sites have image maps as the only thing on their first page. How does a text-only browser user get around that?

I know most people can roughly see what I'm making but I can't exactly define a design. This makes laying out pages extremely hard and designs pretty limited. What people have come up with is amazing.

Imagine what we could achieve if HTML had the same flexibility as paper!

 

By Jeep

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