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Learn Web Design Idea #2 - The Mail Must go through

The world is full of variety, this is true for computer systems as well.  The computer industry allows for a fair amount of difference from system to system.  Screens can be difference sizes, computers can have various capabilities, different fonts and resources may be available between systems, a computer may be in use by a blind or deaf person, a document may be being shown on a scrollable computer screen, or printed onto pages in black and white.  I think those who designed the language that describes web pages knew this... and it seemed the solution they chose for a flexible environment is a flexible implementation...

In the past... most creative design projects come to a final unchanging end...  Sculpture, painting, drawings, books all resolve to a specific unchangeable look no matter who is looking at them... or from where they are seen.  The artist knows that their work will appear exactly as they originally intended.  This is because the same mechanism (the same book, the same painting, the same sculpture) is how the work is seen.  Not so with the web...

With the web the mechanism a work is being viewed on can vary from the mechanism the work was created on. What to do... It seemed the original designers of the web format decided... content, the root information of what is trying to be conveyed should go thru.  So the solution they chose was such that the words and pictures, the ideas of what is being communicated would be preserved, but not necessarily the absolute artistic look.  They allowed the interpreter of the content (the web browser) a fair amount of interpretation over the format of the content.  This way, from system to system, from medium to medium.. the knowledge, the communication, the core essence would have a good chance of coming thru intact.

What this means for design is... we must think in more dynamic terms.  The final result of our work will not be static... it will be ever changing and so the design must be able to hold it's appealing look within a range of interpretations.