It's the end of the web as we know it...
...and everyone else seems to be feeling fine.
Long gone are the days when the internet was inhabited only by computer nerds and Star Trek geeks (this coming from someone who spends far too much time on his PC and could discuss the plotlines to more or less every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so no offense is intended). Nowadays the internet, and particularly the world wide web (WWW) are big business with millions of users and almost as many Internet Serivce Providers. Every day thousands of new web pages appear but to my mind this is part of the problem.

A large number of these sites will contain a picture of the author, a link to the author's friends site and a little "under construction" icon and then never get updated again. And yet these are not the problem. The problem is the sites with a bit more contents. In a large number of these it seems fairly clear that the author just got their hands on a new web authoring program and thought they'd give it a try. Actually manually entering HTML seems to be an art that is rapidly on the decline. I probably know between 50 and 100 people with their own websites and yet I'm fairly certain that the number who enter the HTML in a text editor would be in single figures. And I suspect that in total an even smaller proportion than this do so. This sort of program has two problems in my opinion: firstly the code it generates is sloppy with a large amount of junk which you could happily do without resulting in longer downloads; and secondly it encourages people to use the latest technology only supported by the latest 4.x browsers. While this will undoubtedly please Microsoft and Netscape it is very annoying for those without the processing power, hard drive space or inclination to download the latest browser. The worst thing about this is that none of the new fangled DHTML or other such gadgets are really necessary. It's possible to create a perfectly good webpage without resorting to java applets, animated .GIFs and frames, and in my experience these, especially frames, can make a site worse rather than better, and that's not including the extra time it takes to download.

Whether we like it or not the WWW is getting more advanced. If you want to be able to view even a fraction of the pages available then you need the latest browser and a powerful modem. If you've got Lynx and a 14.4kbps modem then you can forget it. For me, the WWW is becoming a less desirable place to be. Could it be that this will cause fewer new people to join the online community and web site developers to realise the error of their ways and revert to text as their primary medium? Could we once again see discussions of who the best Star Trek captain is, or what is the best programming language? Unlikely, but we can but hope.

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Last updated: 2000/08/15