http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

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Prof. Dr. Style

Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993 (Vernacular Web 3)

For Saskia and Dragan
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Codeword

Every term I give an introduction to Interface Design studies to new
students. 99% of them are under the delusion that the design of
everything in the world is made in Photoshop or other Adobe products.
In case the design is to be perceived on a computer, these Adobe
files will be thrown into a room full of programmers who are longing
to make it all interactive according to noble ideas embedded in the
graphics. So the task is to show non-fictional challenges of new
media and to explain why to study Interface Design. (To make it short
here: interface designers develop projects that will be handed over
to photoshoppers to put gradients on buttons.)

Most of the students will not be convinced and will choose to study
graphic design. Even those who want to be web designers. Though 17
years of the WWW show that you need quite a different skill set for
that. That's why the last 3 hours given to me to influence people who
will not study the web, but will design it anyway, I spent on
highlighting the real history of web design styles. By real history I
mean essential design trends rooted in technologies, believes and
needs of their time, from 1993 to today. Imported visual trends1 are
left outside of this timeline.

Big emphasis in my talk is put on the mid 1990's, an era when the web
was build and arranged and decorated by amateurs, when very web
specific genres and looks were brought to existence, making it an
incredible place to experience.2

But what was earlier? How did the World Wide Web look before this
Internet boom, before it became a riot for star backgrounds, bouncing
envelopes and under construction signs?

Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page
TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/ folder on a
computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor any of his
colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version. The only
thing we know is the URL http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/
TheProject.html and the way the first page ever looked in november
1992. That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic
browser would be released and people outside of CERN would start to
make their pages.

It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made
it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to
find something that was put online that time, it would in the best
case display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian Space Science
Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new Netspace
browser.

But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To
present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google.
Some semesters ago it was possible to make a life performance with
this search. Pages of academics in style were top results. As of June
2010, the magic seems to be gone. To collect enough examples for this
article I had to go till result page 110.

+---------------------------------------+
|                 name                  |
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Paul Embrechts               |
|---------------------------------------|
|Univ.-Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Werner Romisch|
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Heinz Siedentop              |
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Alexander Mirlin             |
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Jan Paredaens                |
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. S.J. Bas Edixhoven           |
|---------------------------------------|
|M.Sc. Dr. Sujatha Ramdorai             |
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Wolfhard Janke               |
|---------------------------------------|
|Prof. dr. P.M.E. De Bra                |
+---------------------------------------+

"Prof.Dr" is a codeword, a tricky search request. I am aware of the
fact that there are users outside of academia as well who always
designed their sites in pure markup or redesigned according to 1993
standards recently. Still I suggest to use this name based on a
scientific title as a tribute to the history, and reminder that all
around the internet the very first pages were build at universities.
To cement this term, within this article I'll use only pages of
senior academics holding a doctoral title.

[hero-small]

URL

It makes sense to check pages with a tilde in their address. But
there is no direct connection today in between URL and page
appearances, a "~" is no guarantee that the page will be made in real
Prof. Dr. style. Anything from a corporate university look to a
generic corporate look can be encountered.

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|        name         |                 URL                  |URL style | design style  |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Edward L.  |http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/    |tilde     |Prof.Dr        |
|(Ned) Wright         |~wright/                              |          |               |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Marcus     |http://www.math.unibas.ch/~grote/     |tilde     |corporate      |
|Grote                |                                      |          |university     |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Christian  |http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/        |tilde     |generic        |
|Dustmann             |                                      |          |corporate      |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

There are enough examples where the tilde is absent but the style of
early web is 100% there:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|        name         |                 URL                  | URL style  | design style  |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Reinhard F.|http://www.imaph.tu-bs.de/home/werner/|subdirectory|Prof. Dr.      |
|Werner               |                                      |            |               |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. rer. nat.  |http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/tc/  |subdirectory|Prof. Dr.      |
|Horst Koppel         |usr/horst/                            |            |               |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Rainer E.  |http://www.opt.math.tugraz.at/burkard/|subdirectory|Prof. Dr.      |
|Burkard              |                                      |            |               |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Robert     |http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/         |subdirectory|Prof. Dr.      |
|Hyatt                |                                      |            |               |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Ronald L.  |http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/   |subdirectory|Prof. Dr.      |
|Rivest               |                                      |            |               |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

It can even happen that Prof. Dr.s registered their own domain, but
kept the style of web pioneers:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|        name         |                 URL                  |URL style | design style  |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Prof. Bernard Moss   |http://www.bernardmoss.org.uk/        |own domain|Prof. Dr.      |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Rev. Prof. Dr. F.N.  |http://www.dr-fnlee.org/              |own domain|Prof. Dr.      |
|Lee                  |                                      |          |               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Though more often a domain name would mean that designers,
photographers and project manager were consulted:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|        name         |                 URL                  |URL style | design style  |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. med. Markus|http://www.professor-suckfuell.de/    |own domain|generic        |
|Suckfull             |                                      |          |corporate      |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Dr. Prof. h.c.       |http://www.hermannscheer.de/          |own domain|generic        |
|Hermann Scheer       |                                      |          |corporate      |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|Prof. Paul Goddard   |http://www.professorpaulgoddard.com/  |own domain|self-promotion |
|---------------------+--------------------------------------+----------+---------------|
|M.D. Oliver Sacks    |http://www.oliversacks.com/           |own domain|self-promotion |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

A "~" in the URL continues to be part of the look and reminds of
early computer culture, when "user" was equal to "developer".3 That's
why, where it is possible, I prefer to use the examples with a tilde.

Primitive and All the Same

Prof. Dr. pages tell the story of the web.

Not because they are retro. It is important to mention, that retro is
the wrong term and notion in this case. Prof. Dr. doesn't mean at all
that the site was made in 1993 and last time updated in 1995. The
opposite. They are usually updated with a list of courses for the
current semester or contain links to contemporary services like
Google Calendar, twitter or embed Google Maps.

+-------------------------------------------------------+
|          name          |last updated|connected service|
|------------------------+------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Alan FT Winfield  |2010-06-08  |                 |
|------------------------+------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr. Michael Bieber|2009-02-02  |Google Calendar  |
|------------------------+------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Steffen Staab     |2010-06-01  |Tag Cloud        |
|------------------------+------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr. Rudolf Schmitt|2010-01-26  |                 |
|------------------------+------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr. Jorg Fliege   |2009-09-26  |Google Maps      |
+-------------------------------------------------------+

It makes them attractive for investigation -- they are actual and
timeless. I mean you can open them in Mosaic 1.0 and it will not
crash.

Still, if not retro, how to describe these pages? Prof. Dr. pages
have their distinct appearance: primitive and all the same. And that
makes them historically significant.

Primitivity tells us the story of the browser being not only a
browser, but also an editor. Every user of the early web was a
producer of web content. Web pages were to be opened in the browser
to look at them, but also to edit them, using existing pages as
templates for new pages. The simple design of HTML made it possible
for the first users to create state of the art pages with only four
to five principal tags. The result was an extremely fast growing web.
There were not many options, this is why we got many pages.

[browser-editor-small]

Next, Prof. Dr. pages look terribly the same. As if they were
generated automatically by the browser, as one student said. Though,
ironically, they are among the last pages generated completely by
humans, not content management systems or services.

They look according to the viewer's browser settings. This reveals
the belief of the early 1990es that any visual design should be left
at the discretion of the user.

Page authors wouldn't define colors, fonts margins and line-lengths.
In turn end users set their preferences for colors, fonts, links,
graphics in their browsers, according to their needs or taste. Not a
big deal, one can say, to decide if to see all the pages of the
internet on a white or a gray background. But don't think about
colors, think about the concept -- each user was defining the look of
the whole WWW for themselves.

Wired journalist Gary Wolfer wrote in 1994:

    "The beauty of this approach is that it allows maximum openness
    and flexibility. All World Wide Web documents are similar, but
    every World Wide Web reader, or browser, can be different."

[colors-mosaic-small]

With the first version of Mosaic one could choose link colors. Later,
NCSA Mosaic allowed to decorate links in many different ways and
choose colors from an RGB palette. It was the highest moment of
"preferences freedom" a user could have.

[highest-moment-small]

The concept "End User = Designer" is long gone. It could only work
for the very small4 web at connected universities.

What was enough to make academic profiles and papers look good
online, became too less for the rest of us. Users didn't want to
customize preferences for the whole internet in their browser, they
wanted to make their pages individual and that this individuality is
not lost in the browsers of others.

As soon as the WWW ventured outside of academia, the paradigm of the
browser changed. In 1995 Netscape reduced the browsers' preferences
palette to colors and fonts, while introducing new additions to HTML
for defining the visual appearance of pages.5

[options-netscape-small]

The WWW, contrived in a Swiss Lab, became people's web.

From Prof. Dr. to Web Vernacular

It is very interesting to watch the transition from a primitive
markup style of 1993 to pure madness of 1996 staying by Prof. Dr.
search results. You can see all the small details that can make a
particular Prof. Dr. web site leave the borders of Prof. Dr. style.

It would also important to stress that Prof. Dr. style is only a
style. It is not equal to pure markup. None of the examples above
would pass HTML1.0 validation. No wonder, Prof. Dr.s are not
professional web developers. They are making their pages by editing
code of their academic peers, who are non-professionals as well. Very
often headings are replaced with a combination font style tags like
bold and font size. Or the semantic <address> tag is substituted with
<pre>.

+----------------------------------------------------------+
|              name               |tags |     used for     |
|---------------------------------+-----+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Kurt Bauknecht|<pre>|address formatting|
|---------------------------------+-----+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Harry Buhrman          |<pre>|address formatting|
|---------------------------------+-----+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Alex Shafarenko        |<pre>|address formatting|
+----------------------------------------------------------+

I still consider pages that misuse visual markup for structural
purposes as Prof. Dr. Style, as opposed to the pages where their
authors make a step to "bring life" to their online home.

You don't have to be web design expert to see the difference in
between personal the home page of Prof. Dr. Stephen Darwall and Prof.
Dr. Harm Derksen. The first a typical representative of Prof. Dr.
Style, the second a striking example of vernacular web.

There are also websites that look exactly like Prof. Dr. but aren't.
Compare these two:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|         name         |          changed defaults           |    web editing software    |
|----------------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Wolfhard    |none                                 |text editor / unknown       |
|Janke                 |                                     |                            |
|----------------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Richard J.  |background color, link colors, fonts |Microsoft Word 2008         |
|Boucherie             |                                     |                            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Both seem like Prof. Dr. though only the first page is. Prof. Dr.
Janke's links are blue and underlined, and when you click one it
becomes red for a short moment to give feedback to the user that the
click was indeed registered by the browser and the requested page is
about to appear any time. It is a reminder of the days when the
internet connection was not so swift and you could stare at an active
link for a while, waiting for a server to connect and packages to
arrive, feeling the effort the best effort network makes. And then
you are brought somewhere far or close. You can go further following
other blue underlined links, or you can go back and see that the link
you just clicked became purple, so that you can distinguish visited
links from unvisited ones.

Prof. Dr. Boucherie changed the default colors of his links (they are
blue even when active and visited) and by this crossed the thin
border that divides Prof. Dr. pages from amateur web and later
styles.This visually unremarkable modification can't be compared with
decorating a page with all sorts of animations and sounds and still
it is an act of users' voluntarism that paved the way to both amateur
and "professional" web.

Modifying colors of links was the first, smallest thing one could do.
Sometimes it is a sign of its authors' curiosity and the will to
fiddle with code:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|         name         |          changed defaults           |    web editing software    |
|----------------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Bernard     |background color, link colors        |WYSIWYG / unknown           |
|Grofman               |                                     |                            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Quite often though the source code would reveal that the page was
created using a word processing software that is able to make links,
but fails to produce lively hypertext:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|         name         |          changed defaults           |    web editing software    |
|----------------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Gerhard     |background color, link colors, fonts |Netscape 4.78, Microsoft    |
|Brewka                |                                     |Word 10                     |
|----------------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Sarah Cook  |background color, link colors, fonts,|Microsoft Word 10           |
|                      |font sizes                           |                            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

A curious example: Prof. Dr. Kender made a Prof. Dr. page. His Ph.D.
student, Hassan H. Malik, opened the page of his mentor in Microsoft
Word and made one for himself. The links are there, blue and
underlined, but they are numb.

The next step is to play around with text in general. Formatting it,
changing font size, bringing color, ...

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|          name          |               text styles                |
|------------------------+------------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Cliff Burgess |colors, sizes                             |
|------------------------+------------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Walter Kohn   |headline color                            |
|------------------------+------------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Carsten Timm  |colors, sizes, removing underlines from   |
|                        |links                                     |
|------------------------+------------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Dines Bjorner |colors, sizes, small caps                 |
|------------------------+------------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Gunther       |blink                                     |
|Rudiger                 |                                          |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

... arrogantly making it blink6, like Prof. Dr. Gunther Rudiger made
for the "Current Issues" heading of his website. Blinking is the pimp
among HTML tags, you should be very self confident to have it on your
page.

The next logical step after bringing colors to the text is to
customize the background color:

+------------------------------+
|    name    |   background    |
|------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                 |
|Martin L.   |#FFFDDC          |
|Kersten     |                 |
|------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                 |
|Freddy      |#CCCCCC          |
|Delbaen     |                 |
|------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |rgb(255, 255,    |
|Markus      |238)             |
|Schneider   |                 |
|------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                 |
|Jillian T.  |#000000          |
|Weiss       |                 |
|------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                 |
|Aravind     |#FFFFEE          |
|Srinivasan  |                 |
|------------+-----------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                 |
|Madelaine   |#e0d2ff          |
|Bohme       |                 |
+------------------------------+

There are 216 web safe colors and more than 16 millions colors in
general, but for somebody really passionate about their webpage, it
will never be enough -- and the background color will be replaced
with a background image:

+----------------------------------+
|    name    |     background      |
|------------+---------------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                     |
|Eugene      |greenwhite_paper.gif |
|(Gene) F.   |                     |
|Milone      |                     |
|------------+---------------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                     |
|Adrian      |g_texture.gif        |
|Bowyer      |                     |
|------------+---------------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |bkgrd023.gif         |
|Peter Hanggi|                     |
|------------+---------------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                     |
|rer. nat.   |Image3.jpg           |
|Ernst Kausen|                     |
+----------------------------------+

A Background image can be just a nice looking pattern, as in the
pages above, or can point out the research field the Prof. Dr. is
active in:

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|    name    |   background   |             observation             |
|------------+----------------+-------------------------------------|
|            |                |"wpaper.gif" is a quite neutral      |
|            |                |pattern, but knowing that Prof. Dr.  |
|            |                |Huybrechts researchers large-scale   |
|Prof. Dr.   |wpaper.gif      |three-dimensional time-dependent     |
|Huybrechts  |                |thermomechanical continental         |
|            |                |ice-sheet models, it is easy to      |
|            |                |assume that it was chosen because it |
|            |                |looks a bit like a glacier.          |
|------------+----------------+-------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |                |Recipient of the Nobel Prize in      |
|Paul J.     |clouds.gif      |Chemistry, Prof. Dr. Paul J. Crutzen,|
|Crutzen     |                |has clouds on his page, because he is|
|            |                |an atmospheric chemist.              |
|------------+----------------+-------------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr.   |ee2.jpg         |Prof. Dr. Delp is professor for      |
|Delp        |                |Electrical and Computer Engineering. |
|------------+----------------+-------------------------------------|
|            |                |Prof. Dr. Eric Carlson --            |
|            |                |astrophysic. Needless to say that an |
|Prof. Dr.   |                |astrophysic's homepage with a star   |
|Eric Carlson|deep.gif        |background is a great finding. Unity |
|            |                |of form and content is a rare guest  |
|            |                |in the world of starbackgrounded     |
|            |                |sites.                               |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

Another crucial modification leading away from the academic look is
replacing semantic mark up elements with graphics. Lists <li>
becoming bullets, bubbles annd icons:

+------------------------------------------------+
|            name             |bullet replacement|
|-----------------------------+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Ashraf Matrawy     |#                 |
|                             |image003.gif      |
|-----------------------------+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Ayodeji Demuren    |*                 |
|                             |4abul.gif         |
|-----------------------------+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Moritz Diehl       |#                 |
|                             |icon.jpg          |
|-----------------------------+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Henk Corporaal     |[MOV]             |
|                             |MOVElogo.gif      |
|-----------------------------+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Andrew S. Tanenbaum|#                 |
|                             |faq.gif           |
|-----------------------------+------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Farzam Farahmand   |#                 |
|                             |acnvbul1.gif      |
+------------------------------------------------+

Horizontal rules <hr> get transformed into more spectacular lines:

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  name  |                                    horizontal line replacement                                     |
|--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Prof.   |                                                                                                    |
|Dr.     |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------             |
|Wolfgang|bu.gif                                                                                              |
|Banzhaf |                                                                                                    |
|--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Prof.   |                                                                                                    |
|Dr.     |----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Ernst   |LINIE.GIF                                                                                           |
|Eberlein|                                                                                                    |
|--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Prof.   |                                                                                                    |
|Dr.     |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------                       |
|Steffen |rainbow.gif                                                                                         |
|Staab   |                                                                                                    |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Then images get animated, making pages below looking less and less
serious.

+--------------------------------------------+
|             name             |GIF animation|
|------------------------------+-------------|
|Prof. Dr. Gerard 't Hooft     |[dee]        |
|                              |deeltje.gif  |
|------------------------------+-------------|
|Prof. Dr. Halina Kwasnicka    |[em]         |
|                              |em.gif       |
|------------------------------+-------------|
|Prof. Dr. Jeff Geensite       |[nuc]        |
|                              |em.gif       |
|------------------------------+-------------|
|Prof. Dr. Dhabaleswar K. Panda|[new]        |
|                              |new.gif      |
|------------------------------+-------------|
|Prof. Dr. Bernard Moss        |#            |
|                              |rotating.gif |
|------------------------------+-------------|
|Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ngoc         |[mailb]      |
|                              |mailbox.GIF  |
+--------------------------------------------+

"Less serious", but only in the eyes of "experts". An article about
Prof. Dr. Style is not a proper place for statements about animated
GIFs, but I can't hold it: Animated GIFs on a web page are not a sign
of low quality or light content. If an icon is animated it only means
that the author of the page has better things to do than reading "10
worst web design mistakes", "Top Ten web designs of the year" and the
likes. This also applies to musicians on Myspace and to an even
greater degree to neurosurgerist Prof. Dr. Ismail Hakki Aydin or the
holder of the Nobel Price in Chemistry 2002, Prof. Dr. Kurt Wuthrich.

Prof. Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid, discoverer of conducted polymers in the
1970's, put an under construction sign on his site in 1998 and got
the Nobel Prize in 2000. His site is also an example of a page with a
grid layout.

Making web layouts with tables, that is arranging content in columns
and cells, was a usual way to design web pages in the 1990's. You
could (and still can) achieve smooth looks with this technique if you
keep borders in between columns and cells invisible. But amateur web
designers preferred to show those borders, and experimented with
their size, color and amount. Academics were no exception:

+---------------------------------------------------------+
|            name             |    table layout style     |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Charles N. Haas    |info grid                  |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Eli Biham          |blocks                     |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Leszek F. Demkowicz|horizontal navigation links|
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Georgy Gimel'farb  |year activity table        |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Michael Anshel     |subpage navigation blocks  |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Gary L. Wells      |columns                    |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Karl Kleinermanns  |business card layout       |
|-----------------------------+---------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Ke Chen            |decorative borders         |
+---------------------------------------------------------+

And as other users, who are making their pages looking at the pages
of others, they stepped in the traps of navigation menus ...

+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|             name              |         navigation style          |
|-------------------------------+-----------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Josef Kallrath       |left side column with decorative   |
|                               |image                              |
|-------------------------------+-----------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. B. B. Chaudhuri      |left side column with university   |
|                               |logo                               |
|-------------------------------+-----------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Vincent Gaudet       |left side column with decorative   |
|                               |image                              |
|-------------------------------+-----------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Aurelian Isar        |left side column with university   |
|                               |logo                               |
|-------------------------------+-----------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Michael    |left side tabs                     |
|Bender                         |                                   |
|-------------------------------+-----------------------------------|
|Prof. Dr. Bernhard Nebel       |left side global site hierarchy    |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

... and navigation menus in framesets:

+-------------------------------------------+
|           name            |frameset layout|
|---------------------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Joseph P.H. Fan  |[fs1]          |
|---------------------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Zongjin Li       |[fs1]          |
|---------------------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Ewa B. Weinmuller|[fs2]          |
|---------------------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Tayfun Akin      |[fs1]          |
|---------------------------+---------------|
|Prof. Dr. Pavel Kroupa     |[fs3]          |
+-------------------------------------------+

To sum it up, through curiosity about the new medium, ignorance of
w3c recommendations and passion to their profession, web users
(irrespective of their scientific achievements) created an
environment where everything seemed possible:

  * Prof. Dr. Winfried Kerkhoff presents his life and work via a site
    Deleuze and Guattari would give their limbs for;
  * Prof Dr. Civelek writes her name in glitter and put her CV on a
    free hosting server;
  * Ph.D. student Quan makes a home page for his mentor -- Prof. Dr.
    Schneider. It is not really readable and doesn't mention the
    professor's name, but still it's more meaningful than the
    official interactive business card Prof. Dr. Schneider got from
    his University.

Amateur style7 was once the mainstream. Ridiculed and almost erased
in the very late 1990's, it came back to the public's attention
during the "web2.0" wave. Though the original amateur culture was
very different from web2.0, many of its elements survived and in
today's web carry the meaning of a close, true relationship in
between users and their medium. The Vernacular Web is a recognized
phenomenon.

And what message is delivered by classic Prof. Dr. pages, looking
primitive and all the same? Independence. Inside academic circles, a
page made in Prof. Dr. Style shows off distance from the
institution's corporate identity and its Content or Knowledge
Management systems, which is not an easy status to achieve. Outside
of academia, such pages are made by people who know everything about
the internet, but are too cool to mess with web design.

Furthermore, Prof. Dr. pages offer an experience that soon will be
unique.

Cyber National Parks

In its 17 years history the WWW was announced to die soon many many
times. Not only it survived, it became all-embracing and is close to
immortality. What is doing really bad is hypertext.

Web browsers developing in the direction of operating systems are
leaving the idea of interlinked documents behind. Though hypertext is
technically still there, it is not important any more, neither is
surfing or linking. The web consists mainly of application interfaces
where users activate functions.

Though the dismissal of the page metaphor is no explanation why those
web pages that are still pages are made without any respect to
hypertext. For example, there is hardly any page left that doesn't
contain links that lead to the same page that is already displayed.
Let's say you clicked the "about" link, and you came to the "about"
page; the link "about" will still be there, you can click it forever
and it will reload the same page forever. That's what we8 call Zombie
Links.

Some Internet Giants like Google or Flickr avoid Zombie Links on
their facades, if you go deeper you'll step in the mud. Most others
don't care at all, because their links are not important for
navigation. Users don't surf, they search in Google.

Another reason is the extensive use of Content Management Systems
(CMS). They make it easy to create navigation for complex projects
and establish links within them, but they are not monitoring where
the links are pointing to; if they do, most don't make anything
useful from this information.

Users don't protest against Zombie Links and clumsy hypertext because
in the times of fast Internet connections two or three needless
clicks are not a big deal. Pages reload almost seamlessly, you can't
even call it reloading, just flickering. Designers don't care because
they are mostly graphic designers, who are interested in the look of
the link and gladly delegate its behavior to a CMS.

Constant reload-flickering is the pitiful state of hypertext today.
Even Wikipedia, a project that has hypertext at its core, is
plastered with self-reloading pseudo-navigation links.

One might think that there is actually more than enough classic
hypertext around. For example, Google's links are all blue, flash in
red when clicked and change to purple after they are visited. But
these colors are fake! They are fixed by the site's design, not by my
browser preferences. Mosaic's classic default link color is the only
element from the Prof. Dr. web era that survived to the present day
-- however only in the form of superficial styling.

The last places to experience real online hypertext, hand made links,
that look and behave like links, are the pages of the early web
adopters and those who still follows their spirit. Visit them with
your kids:

["Prof. Dr."         ] Google Search
Olia Lialina, July 2010

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Footnotes

(1) Here are some Web Design Trends of 2007 2008, 2009 and 2010 (
another), according to web design magazines.

(2) Try Drachenglut, Star Murals, Mr. Bui Quoc Quan or Accept Jesus,
read A Vernacular Web 1 and A Vernacular Web 2!

(3) For more on user culture see Digital Folklore.

(4) It was small indeed, one could describe all its contents on just
20 pages of the fat compendium "The Whole Internet".

(5) Today it appears as if the look and behavior of all web pages is
under total control of their creators. Web authors describe how pages
should look in CSS and browsers follow this standard to the letter.
Preferences to change the look of web elements like in Mosaic have
almost disappeared from current browsers. However, right now web
users have much more power to alter not only the visual design but
also the structure and functionality of anything they encounter in
their browsers: AddOns (Firefox) or Extensions (Chrome) allow web
users to write and share small pieces of arbitrary code running in
the browser, potentially turning the web upside down. The most
popular use is filtering out advertisments, a more radical example is
connecting the amazon.com DVD store with corresponding free offers at
Pirate Bay. As of yet, not many users really apply this technology
because it is more complicated than changing preferences for font
sizes. Also, the illusion of a stable web is comforting to most
users.

(6) At the time of this writing, the only browsers still supporting
the native <blink> tag are Firefox and Opera.

(7) can also appear under the name "Geocities 1996", "Dirtstyle" or
"mid-90's"

(8) Teachers of the ID pathway of Merz Akademie. Term coined by
Dragan Espenschied.