Are you a Web designer? Ever even put a page online? I've got a tantalizing prospect for you.
Imagine that you never again have to worry about how people use your Web site. Gone are the navigational headaches. Say goodbye to the endless hours devoted to site-map construction, page flows, and links that do nothing but move people through your site. And, finally, you can get rid of that annoying column that runs down the left side of every page on your site.
You get to lay out pages and do nothing but pure design. In essence, you've got a team of world-class interface designers and information architects behind you doing all the hard work. Nothing left for you but the fun stuff.
Pipe dream? Maybe. But maybe not.
A number of interesting new technologies are creeping into today's browsers, both behind the scenes and in their interfaces, that could change the way we think about a "page" on the Web.
Look at the recent changes in both Microsoft's and Netscape's browser interfaces. As the hype around push media and subscription-based channels begins to die down, we can see what all the excitement has been about. What we're left with is simply a new interface to smarter bookmarks. Sure, the scheduled delivery options and dynamic HTML stuff is cool and all, but when you strip the frosting away, you're left with a simple and effective visual display of a set of user preferences - your channels. The browser simply reads a structured set of commands - in this case URLs, timing instructions, and a top-level hierarchy of the delivered site - and renders them in a way that makes sense in the native browser environment. And they're quite similar in both browsers; Netscape's Netcaster slides in from the right, Microsoft's Active Channels zip out of the left edge of the screen. Microsoft takes this interface metaphor a step further by applying it to bookmarks, history, and searching.
Now let's take this a step further. Imagine relying on this interface as a site author. You could link a set of resources from your pages that pointed to a simple site map, a search interface, advertising, and other navigational aids. Then, when a user hit your site, the browser would display the information much like the channels are being displayed today: A panel could slide on the screen, show your site's logo, map, ads, and search form, and then slide off the edge of the screen, where it would be waiting if they needed it. And what would be left on the screen? Nothing but pure content. Utopia!
The pieces are starting to fall into place on the technology end. Microsoft's Channel Definition Format, or CDF, starts to scratch the surface as an easy-to-generate collection of metadata about your site. Other work is underway in the standards bodies of the World Wide Web Consortium to provide for richer ways to add context to your site (you might want to read up on the XML project as a primer on this work).
Standards, of course, are the key. We need a universal way to provide this information to all browsers. I've used the example of television remote controls before, and it still holds true. If every television show had its own remote control, simply watching an evening's worth of shows would be a painful experience. The same concept applies to the Web. Standard navigation, resource linking, and yes, even advertising, are all good things. They can save us all a lot of time and a lot of frustration.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
