Tech

well, it’s not!

For years now my sig line has been “It’s not paper.” We can’t design or architect for the […]

For years now my sig line has been “It’s not paper.” We can’t design or architect for the web without understanding its nature (see my earlier post, The beginning of thinking)

Owen has a bright and remarkably calm “rant” on desingers that don’t get the medium they are working in.

‘The Web is not Print’

“This isn’t news to anyone. But the web isn’t screen either. Or more accurately it is print, and screen, and voice, and many other things. Right now it’s December 2001 and chances are you’re reading this on a PC or a Mac, so you think you’re building pages for PC or Mac. Well, just stop. That’s going to confuse the heck out of you as you build with CSS.”

for fun sakes, some of my other sig lines have been

“Sweetcheeks, your desperate clinging to Old World technology was endearing at first, but now it just makes me tired. Paper is for the little people. ”
—Heidi and Josh

“She was sinister but she was happy” –Robyn Hitchcock

To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.

William Carlos Williams

feel free to share your favorite sig.

9 Comments

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  1. 1
    ralph

    Gawd, I’ve been telling people that for years. It hasn’t made me any friends. 🙂 I kind of expressed my opinion on that in my Guest Gleaning item about Ernie Kovacs.

    Helping my fiancee with her homework this week, to create a site in WML for use on WAP devices, simply drove home the point about authoring for your chosen medium, not the one you’re used to creating for.

    Funny you should mention .signatures. With Google posting their comprehensive Usenet archive going back to 1981, I’ve been looking at a lot of my old .signatures. My favorite was

    “Work flows toward the competent until they are submerged – Brandi’s Law”

    Then there was the line lifted from a song by a friend’s band:

    “‘Stay Idiot Proof’ –Log”

    And finally, that classic, ripped off from Schoolhouse Rock:

    “Darn! That’s the end!”

  2. 2
    owen

    “I did not come here to learn about building and marketing products for ubiquitous wireless access. I came here to a) party, b) be insulted, and c) make the person below me as powerful as the person above me.”

    -spotted recently at haddock.org. think i need this tatooed or on boxer shorts. something to remind me when i’m at some soulless function being a mere cog.

  3. 3
    mick

    To the user the interface is the product
    -I forget

    Process is more important than outcome. When outcome drives the process we will only ever get where we’ve already been. If process drives the outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there…”
    -Bruce Mau

  4. 4
    ralph

    On the topic of how the web isn’t paper, I offer this quote from the front page of the site of The Web Standards Project:

    Above all the problem lies with clients who confuse the web with print. Who insist on pixel-perfect rendering of their sites in user agents incapable of such renderings except at the expense of interoperability, accessibility, and document structure. And who are so concerned with “backward compatibility” that they neglect the far more important issue of forward compability.

    Sadly, this is part of the message where they explain that they’re giving up.

  5. 5
    Sandra

    <shameless sucking up>

    I really like something Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com) said:

    A user interface is well designed when the program behaves exactly the way the user thought it would.

    … but that was a little lengthly, so my new favorite is:

    Ignorance is about things, not people.

    This, of course, is a tip of the hat to Christina!

    </shameless sucking up>

  6. 6
    christina

    I don’t even remember saying that. I need my own scribe.

    I do like this sig, though I’m not sure if I should believe it’s Shaw or Nietzsche

    “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” -Friedrich Nietzsche”

    “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – George Bernard Shaw

  9. 9
    Sandra

    Oops! I am really sorry – I have been associating this quote with you for the longest time, when actually it should be attributed to Carolyn Snyder!

    Agh, I’m so embarrassed! Anyway, here is her excellent article, which got me to thinking about it: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-tricks/?dwzone=usability

    I hope that at least you have linked to this at some time in the past, and this is perhaps where my association came from. Heh heh. Probably not, though, and I’m just an eediot!

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