Power grows out of the barrel of a gun - Mao Tse-Tung
Money talks - Anonymous
Knowledge itself is power - Francis Bacon
From: Power Shift by Alvin Toffler
A large number of campaigns promoting some or other cause are running constantly on the web. These range from the totally absurd to seriously comic to absolutely serious. A number of these were running before the large scale rise of the Internet, but quickly adapted to the new medium. Email was at first used as a medium for fast communication and the WWW lately used to advocate the cause. Evolving with and from this new medium came a large number of new campaigns, concerned this time with the Internet itself.
Most of these meta-campaigns are involved with some specific aspect of the Internet. Although most of these might at first glance seem unrelated (even parodies of serious issues) concern about the stability and functionality of the Internet as a whole and the WWW specifically can be heard in every voice.
Most of these campaign are also fighting a highly visible enemy or perceived enemy. A much more subtle danger are however lurking in our midsts and threatens the longterm stability of the Internet. Not bandwidth problems or spam. But slow and small changes, invisible to the casual observer or disinterested user; difficult to find by the expert but alarming to the visionary.
It is my strong conviction that some kind of meta-campaign are needed to ensure the longterm stability of a lot of effort going into the WWW at the moment.
Do these quick test:
Find a book.
If you found a book, try and read it.
Find a 100 year old book.
If you found a 100 year old book, try and read it.
Do you know what a punchcard is?
Find a punchcard.
If you found a punchcard, try and find something that can read it.
How old are punchcards?
Find a 360K floppy (or 1.2M for that matter).
If you found one, try and get a machine to read it.
If you found a 360K (or 1.2M) floppy with data on, try and read the data.
Gutenberg's invention of the movable type in the mid-fifteenth century caused a revolution in the diffusion of knowledge. The year 2000 is around the corner, and barring possible language difficulties, his books are still readable. And permanent! Punchcards and floppies are media from the information age used to store data. The average person will be lucky if still able to read a 360K floppy, nevermind retrieving the data stored on the floppy.
This same kind of analogy can be applied to Internet applications. Will that fancy plugin needed to access your cool page still function a year from now? A large amount of paperbased material from a 100 years ago are still used regularly and are the only records from that time-period. Darwin's book on the Origin of the Species are still quoted and Einstein's theory of relativity is still highly relevant. A lot of material being published on the Web today will still be highly relevant and usable in 100 years time (the date today - 1997-6-11). But will it still be readable? Or seen approximately in the way the author intented?
This is not a campaign for the banning of flashing frames full of virtual worlds, but rather a plea for the establishment of a set of core rules for the Internet in general and webdesign specifically. What are needed is a set of Basic Rules (like the American Bill of Human Rights or the newly forged South African Constitution) which can not be changed. This would provide those who are serious about the permanency and dissemination of their information a sense of security and enable sensible design in a stable environment. At the same time, this could provide a pointer to tags that are sorely needed.
At present all empty space are collapsed into a single space. As a consequence, a special entity, the non-breaking space had to be created to create more than one consecuitive space. If this rule should ever change, it will mean that a large number of pages (if not all) will have to be rewritten and redesigned. I don't have the time to do that.
A number of theories (each with a different level of abstraction) are used to try and explain the world around us. These can all be used to explain the development of the Internet and predict its possible futures. If each of these are apllied in turn to the Internet a number red lights start flashing.
Is this the Cambrian Era of the Internet with a large explosion of creativity and proliferation of ideas?
Three possible mechanisms try and explain evolution and development in the natural world.