Web Antipatterns

Check out this Review of Firefox at Net Gazette. It looks like a good old fashioned site at first but look closer. There is no actual text! The review consists completely of images… images of text. Each paragraph is a separate image arranged into tables for layout. What’s even more interesting is how they, uh, “implemented” links. Each image-of-text has an image-map attached to it defining each links coordinates. I realize we need all the good press we can get but this site championing your browser is a bit like having the Ku Klux Klan back your presidential candidate.

I thought this was a really great example of a web architecture antipattern and it reminded me of something I wanted to point people to. The w3c recently put out the Architecture of the World Wide Web as a Proposed Recommendation. I really cannot express how much I like this document. It’s very different from the recent slew of crap that has been flowing from the w3c. It isn’t a specification at all, really, but rather a look at what the web got right. Sadly, using images-of-text-wrapped-in-tables isn’t covered.

All content that comes to the web goes through a sucky phase before reaching true Web Zen. Reaching this elevated state requires answering the question, “What is it about the web medium that improves on existing forms of content delivery?” and then seizing them.

The benefits for most types of textual content is well known. That’s why sites like the Net Gazette are so baffling. Bringing your rag to the web means that the text can be indexed by search engines. I can select some text, copy it, and paste in an email to a friend. Innovative services like Technorati can do amazing stuff by drawing associations based on linking characteristics. And the list goes on… However, when content first comes to the web, it takes awhile for the providers to realize these benefits and so you sometimes sees glitches in the system like the Net Gazette.

Publishers aren’t the only ones that have this problem. A large portion of the technical community still considers anything that can be had through a web browser to be web-based. This misconception has led to a mess of “web apps” built using technologies like Active X, Java Applets, and Flash to create pseudo web-apps: apps that run in a browser but provide none of the real benefits of being part of the web. You don’t see a lot of these floating around on the public web but they are rampant in the enterprise/intranet space (which, btw, can benefit from web architecture just as much as the public web). “Web-based” means taking advantage of the web’s core architecture: URLs, open (and somewhat standard) data formats, and HTTP. The browser is just one tool for tapping into the ether spawned by this architecture.

It’s fun to point at the Net Gazette and chuckle for them Not Getting It when we have so many cases of content providers that do get it. But the Net Gazette isn’t alone and I want to use this occasion to make a bigger point. The big multimedia content providers (read: Networks) still don’t understand the differentiating features that make the web an attractive medium for content delivery. They are trying to emulate TV and radio over the web. This is a mistake. The web isn’t a TV and it isn’t a radio and it isn’t a paper-book either. Trying to force it to be is like trying to cook filet mignon in the microwave.

I wonder how it’s possible that the news sites, radio stations, and book publishers have been doing this web thing for years now and have yet to ask the most basic question: “Why?” Why put audio/video/books on the web? The TV is far superior device for delivering video the way it’s delivered today. The radio is far superior for delivering audio the way it’s delivered today. The book is far superior for delivering story the way it’s delivered today. What does the web bring to the table? Well, not much at the moment. Today, you can go watch a clip of some news when you feel like it instead of when it’s time-slotted. So, we’ve found that time-shifted media is one benefit of the web. But what of linking, excerpting, copying, and indexing? The multimedia content providers have erected barriers to making these things possible and I’m not sure why (actually, I do know why in cases like copying and it has to do with lawyers).

The really big erection right now is “Streaming”. So what of streaming? Streaming is one of the shittiest ideas ever. In almost all cases just plopping a MP3 or MPEG file out on a server somewhere is the better solution. Streaming is all about trying to turn the web into a TV or radio. The only reason you should be streaming is if you are pushing out live content. Otherwise, it doesn’t buy you anything and acts as barrier to multimedia becoming a normal part of the web. Jon Udell has covered this for O’Reilly in Prime-Time Hypermedia and Marrying Hypertext and Hypermedia. He shows how audio and video could, with a few small tweaks, become proper citizens of the web.

People are starting to get it. There’s been a lot of chatter about Podcasting lately. This is a really simple concept that is being touted as, among other things, revolutionary. And it is revolutionary! But not for the reasons we usually call things revolutionary in IT, not because it’s using some really cool new buzzward technologies that’s more complex than what we have today. It’s revolutionary because it takes advantage of the simple ideas the web is built on and uses them to provide distinct features that you cannot get with radios and TVs today. Podcasting is an important step because it represents people accepting the web’s natural advantages and building solutions for them instead of in spite of them.

I also want to dump on Ebooks for a second. I’m so sick of hearing how Ebooks are a tremendous failure. I mean, they are a failure, but not because digitizing books is a bad idea. The publishers just haven’t asked “Why?” yet. I’ll defer to Corey Doctorow to make my point here, as he does it so well in The Microsoft Research DRM Talk:

New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

Doctorow gets the web.