Prof. Dr. Style

Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993 (Vernacular Web 3) Codeword Every term I give an introduction to Interface Design studies to new students. 99% of them are under the delusion that the design of everything in the world is made in Photoshop or other Adobe products. In case the design is to be perceived on a computer, these Adobe files will be thrown into a room full of programmers who are longing to make it all interactive according to noble ideas embedded in the graphics. So the task is to show non-fictional challenges of new media and to explain why to study Interface Design. (To make it short here: interface designers develop projects that will be handed over to photoshoppers to put gradients on buttons.) Most of the students will not be convinced and will choose to study graphic design. Even those who want to be web designers. Though 17 years of the WWW show that you need quite a different skill set for that. That's why the last 3 hours given to me to influence people who will not study the web, but will design it anyway, I spent on highlighting the real history of web design styles. By real history I mean essential design trends rooted in technologies, believes and needs of their time, from 1993 to today. Imported visual trends1 are left outside of this timeline. Big emphasis in my talk is put on the mid 1990's, an era when the web was build and arranged and decorated by amateurs, when very web specific genres and looks were brought to existence, making it an incredible place to experience.2 But what was earlier? How did the World Wide Web look before this Internet boom, before it became a riot for star backgrounds, bouncing envelopes and under construction signs? Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/ folder on a computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor any of his colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version. The only thing we know is the URL http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and the way the first page ever looked in november 1992. That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic browser would be released and people outside of CERN would start to make their pages. It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian Space Science Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new Netspace browser. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google. Some semesters ago it was possible to make a life performance with this search. Pages of academics in style were top results. As of June 2010, the magic seems to be gone. To collect enough examples for this article I had to go till result page 110. name Prof. Dr. Paul Embrechts Univ.-Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Werner Römisch Prof. Dr. Heinz Siedentop Prof. Dr. Alexander Mirlin Prof. Dr. Jan Paredaens Prof. Dr. S.J. Bas Edixhoven M.Sc. Dr. Sujatha Ramdorai Prof. Dr. Wolfhard Janke Prof. dr. P.M.E. De Bra "Prof.Dr" is a codeword, a tricky search request. I am aware of the fact that there are users outside of academia as well who always designed their sites in pure markup or redesigned according to 1993 standards recently. Still I suggest to use this name based on a scientific title as a tribute to the history, and reminder that all around the internet the very first pages were build at universities. To cement this term, within this article I'll use only pages of senior academics holding a doctoral title. URL It makes sense to check pages with a tilde in their address. But there is no direct connection today in between URL and page appearances, a "~" is no guarantee that the page will be made in real Prof. Dr. style. Anything from a corporate university look to a generic corporate look can be encountered. name URL URL style design style Prof. Dr. Edward L. (Ned) Wright http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/~wright/ tilde Prof.Dr Prof. Dr. Marcus Grote http://www.math.unibas.ch/~grote/ tilde corporate university Prof. Dr. Christian Dustmann http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/ tilde generic corporate There are enough examples where the tilde is absent but the style of early web is 100% there: name URL URL style design style Prof. Dr. Reinhard F. Werner http://www.imaph.tu-bs.de/home/werner/ subdirectory Prof. Dr. Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Horst Köppel http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/tc/usr/horst/ subdirectory Prof. Dr. Prof. Dr. Rainer E. Burkard http://www.opt.math.tugraz.at/burkard/ subdirectory Prof. Dr. Prof. Dr. Robert Hyatt http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/ subdirectory Prof. Dr. Prof. Dr. Ronald L. Rivest http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/ subdirectory Prof. Dr. It can even happen that Prof. Dr.s registered their own domain, but kept the style of web pioneers: name URL URL style design style Prof. Bernard Moss http://www.bernardmoss.org.uk/ own domain Prof. Dr. Rev. Prof. Dr. F.N. Lee http://www.dr-fnlee.org/ own domain Prof. Dr. Though more often a domain name would mean that designers, photographers and project manager were consulted: name URL URL style design style Prof. Dr. med. Markus Suckfüll http://www.professor-suckfuell.de/ own domain generic corporate Dr. Prof. h.c. Hermann Scheer http://www.hermannscheer.de/ own domain generic corporate Prof. Paul Goddard http://www.professorpaulgoddard.com/ own domain self-promotion M.D. Oliver Sacks http://www.oliversacks.com/ own domain self-promotion A "~" in the URL continues to be part of the look and reminds of early computer culture, when "user" was equal to "developer".3 That's why, where it is possible, I prefer to use the examples with a tilde. Primitive and All the Same Prof. Dr. pages tell the story of the web. Not because they are retro. It is important to mention, that retro is the wrong term and notion in this case. Prof. Dr. doesn't mean at all that the site was made in 1993 and last time updated in 1995. The opposite. They are usually updated with a list of courses for the current semester or contain links to contemporary services like Google Calendar, twitter or embed Google Maps. name last updated connected service Prof. Alan FT Winfield 2010-06-08 Prof. Dr. Michael Bieber 2009-02-02 Google Calendar Prof. Steffen Staab 2010-06-01 Tag Cloud Prof. Dr. Rudolf Schmitt 2010-01-26 Prof. Dr. Jörg Fliege 2009-09-26 Google Maps It makes them attractive for investigation -- they are actual and timeless. I mean you can open them in Mosaic 1.0 and it will not crash. Still, if not retro, how to describe these pages? Prof. Dr. pages have their distinct appearance: primitive and all the same. And that makes them historically significant. Primitivity tells us the story of the browser being not only a browser, but also an editor. Every user of the early web was a producer of web content. Web pages were to be opened in the browser to look at them, but also to edit them, using existing pages as templates for new pages. The simple design of HTML made it possible for the first users to create state of the art pages with only four to five principal tags. The result was an extremely fast growing web. There were not many options, this is why we got many pages. Next, Prof. Dr. pages look terribly the same. As if they were generated automatically by the browser, as one student said. Though, ironically, they are among the last pages generated completely by humans, not content management systems or services. They look according to the viewer's browser settings. This reveals the belief of the early 1990es that any visual design should be left at the discretion of the user. Page authors wouldn't define colors, fonts margins and line-lengths. In turn end users set their preferences for colors, fonts, links, graphics in their browsers, according to their needs or taste. Not a big deal, one can say, to decide if to see all the pages of the internet on a white or a gray background. But don't think about colors, think about the concept -- each user was defining the look of the whole WWW for themselves. Wired journalist Gary Wolfer wrote in 1994: "The beauty of this approach is that it allows maximum openness and flexibility. All World Wide Web documents are similar, but every World Wide Web reader, or browser, can be different." With the first version of Mosaic one could choose link colors. Later, NCSA Mosaic allowed to decorate links in many different ways and choose colors from an RGB palette. It was the highest moment of "preferences freedom" a user could have. The concept "End User = Designer" is long gone. It could only work for the very small4 web at connected universities. What was enough to make academic profiles and papers look good online, became too less for the rest of us. Users didn't want to customize preferences for the whole internet in their browser, they wanted to make their pages individual and that this individuality is not lost in the browsers of others. As soon as the WWW ventured outside of academia, the paradigm of the browser changed. In 1995 Netscape reduced the browsers' preferences palette to colors and fonts, while introducing new additions to HTML for defining the visual appearance of pages.5 The WWW, contrived in a Swiss Lab, became people's web. From Prof. Dr. to Web Vernacular It is very interesting to watch the transition from a primitive markup style of 1993 to pure madness of 1996 staying by Prof. Dr. search results. You can see all the small details that can make a particular Prof. Dr. web site leave the borders of Prof. Dr. style. It would also important to stress that Prof. Dr. style is only a style. It is not equal to pure markup. None of the examples above would pass HTML1.0 validation. No wonder, Prof. Dr.s are not professional web developers. They are making their pages by