Prof. Dr. Style
Prof. Dr. Style
Top 10 Web Design Styles of 1993 (Vernacular Web 3)
For Saskia and Dragan
Codeword
Every term I give an introduction to Interface Design studies to new<br>students. 99% of them are under the delusion that the design of<br>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<br>will be thrown into a room full of programmers who are longing<br>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<br>and to explain why to study Interface Design. (To make it short here:<br>interface designers develop projects that will be handed over to<br>photoshoppers to put gradients on buttons.)
Most of the students will not be convinced and will choose to study<br>graphic design. Even those who want to be web designers. Though 17 years<br>of the WWW show that you need quite a different skill set for that.
That's why the last 3 hours given<br>to me to influence people who will not study the web, but will design<br>it anyway, I spent on highlighting the real history of web<br>design styles. By real history I mean essential design trends rooted in<br>technologies, believes and needs of their time, from 1993 to today.<br>Imported visual trends1 are left outside<br>of this timeline.
Big emphasis in my talk is put on the mid 1990's, an era when the<br>web was build and arranged and decorated by amateurs, when very web<br>specific genres and looks were brought to existence, making it an<br>incredible place to experience.2
But what was earlier? How did the World Wide Web look before<br>this Internet boom, before it became a riot for star<br>backgrounds, bouncing envelopes and under construction signs?
Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page<br>TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/<br>folder on a computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor<br>any of his colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version.<br>The only thing we know is the URL<br>http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html<br>and the way the first page ever looked in november 1992.<br>That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic browser would<br>be released and people outside of CERN would start to make their<br>pages.
It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made<br>it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to<br>find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case<br>display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian<br>Space Science Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new<br>Netspace browser.
But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To<br>present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google.<br>Some semesters ago it was possible to make a life performance with<br>this search. Pages of academics in style were top results. As of June<br>2010, the magic seems to be gone. To collect enough examples for this<br>article I had to go till result page 110.
name
Prof. Dr. Paul Embrechts
Univ.-Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Werner Römisch
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<br>of the fact that there are users outside of academia as well who always<br>designed their sites in pure markup or redesigned according to 1993<br>standards recently. Still I suggest to use this name based on a<br>scientific title as a tribute to the history, and reminder that all<br>around the internet the very first pages were build at universities.<br>To cement this term, within this article I'll use only pages of senior<br>academics holding a doctoral title.
URL
It makes sense to check pages with a<br>tilde<br>in their address. But there is no direct connection today<br>in between URL and page appearances, a "~" is no guarantee that the<br>page will be made in real Prof. Dr. style. Anything from a corporate<br>university look to a generic corporate look can be encountered.
name<br>URL<br>URL style<br>design style
Prof. Dr. Edward L. (Ned) Wright<br>http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/~wright/<br>tilde<br>Prof.Dr
Prof. Dr. Marcus Grote<br>http://www.math.unibas.ch/~grote/<br>tilde<br>corporate university
Prof. Dr. Christian Dustmann<br>http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctpb21/<br>tilde<br>generic corporate
There are enough examples where the tilde is absent but the style of<br>early web is 100% there:
name<br>URL<br>URL style<br>design style
Prof. Dr. Reinhard F. Werner<br>http://www.imaph.tu-bs.de/home/werner/<br>subdirectory<br>Prof. Dr.
Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Horst Köppel<br>http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/tc/usr/horst/<br>subdirectory<br>Prof. Dr.
Prof. Dr. Rainer E. Burkard<br>http://www.opt.math.tugraz.at/burkard/<br>subdirectory<br>Prof. Dr.
Prof. Dr. Robert Hyatt<br>http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/<br>subdirectory<br>Prof. Dr.
Prof. Dr. Ronald L. Rivest<br>http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/<br>subdirectory<br>Prof. Dr.
It can even happen that Prof....