Distantly Yours: Web Design and Photos in Bloomington, IN, by Dan Hiester

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Ten years ago, what I really loved about the world wide web was that it seemed to be a mass medium that didn’t belong to corporations, or any other sort of media gatekeeper. Anyone could publish something to this medium, get their thoughts, sights and sounds out there for anyone to find.

Now, I’m beginning to realize the web does have gatekeepers. They’re called web developers, and I am one of them.

Web developers have alienated web users

This is for a handful of reasons, really. CSS, despite all its accomplishments, has made web development complicated enough that it requires a great deal of experience to be deployed correctly.

Web development has also developed a culture that respects the hand-coder and scoffs at the WYSIWYG editor – at the cost of alienating the masses from the medium that once belonged to them.

Newer sites establish a caste system online

Furthermore, “Web 2.0,” while well-intended, further segregates professional web developers from the casual web citizen, creating virtual neighborhoods for web citizens to reside in. Depending on the whim of the developers, some of these virtual neighborhoods are ghettos, while others are upper class. The key here is that, in the past, anyone could build their own website from scratch. Today, developers do the building from scratch, permitting users to make superficial changes.

Granted, I don’t think that makes Web 2.0 a bad thing, but the complications to web development introduced by CSS 2 and semantic markup, combined with a snobbish contempt for WYSIWYG editing, constitutes a problem that could have been solved by now, but hasn’t.

Can nothing ever truly belong to the masses?

Maybe all of the above is the sign of a medium maturing, becoming more sophisticated, more functional, and ultimately more useful. But to me, it still raises the question: Why can’t the masses keep anything for themselves? Is it because there is no such thing as a homogenous society that can all agree on one thing?

After all, even faith is supposed to belong to the masses, but the masses choose to splinter themselves into various sects that each claim to have a unique sense of ownership over faith.

In other words, if the masses all maintained their claim on one thing, unanimously, individuality would not even exist.

Back to Earth

Bottom line is: The web used to belong to everyone. Now it doesn’t. And this poses very serious issues to web developers, that we all need to think about at least once. We need to remember that, once upon a time, anyone could have made a web page. Now, we have clients we talk to every day who can’t.