Web Flexibility

Like singing a song or writing a story, designing a printed page is a draft is fundamentally uni-directional, or one-to-many.

The flexibility of web structures confounded and then humbled many traditional designers as they started trying to make web pages.

The whole thing had been developed to let the readers – the users, software developers confusingly called them, as if they were addicts – have control. How could that be good ? For these reasons, and others, most magazines’ web sites until very recently were dull, repurposed versions of their print editions.

Thus, a new crowd took on the design of web sites. These enthusiasts assumed that the print crowd didn’t get it, that what they saw the “new paradigm” would last forever.

The two way flow of information, the Web’s flexibility, immediacy, and cheapness, deeply appealed to them. But it was not as if these early Web designers were starting with a blank page. They had to work within the limitations of the graphic browser, which at first could not even be divided into frames.

The Mosaic browser itself had to work within the clunky graphical –user-interface conventions of the Windows operating system.