Unearthing the unspoken practices of web designers, from <td> to <br> to <div>.
In the Fall of 2006, I was asked to give a lecture to the students in John Maeda's computational design class MAS.110 here at MIT. The topic was "MIDI and the web".
The short answer is that MIDI has nothing to do with the web. The longer answer is that they're related. Somehow. Maybe.
MIDI was designed as an abstraction of musical notation, lending itself to manipulation and formal interpretation. I pointed out that while MIDI is actually incredibly uninteresting, musicians have since leveraged this structure to do strange and unusual things. I suggested that the digestion of the MIDI format took time, but produced unanticipated results.
I then suggested that something similar may be happening with respect to web design. In some respects, CSS may be the MIDI equivalent for the web. The question, then, is whether or not we will also see unanticipated things emerge from the digestion of CSS in the web space.
How is web design changing? For one thing, the line breaks appear to be disappearing...
<br> and <div> tag distribution for the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/public/us).
Source data obtained from the internet archive (http://www.archive.org)
<br> and <div>tag distribution for http://www.cnn.com
Source data obtained from the internet archive (http://www.archive.org)
Does any of this mean anything? Probably not. But it's interesting.