“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

Saturday, August 2, 2008

God Save Us From People With Better Ideas

Well, I have finally managed to get my Web site revised and updated, at the expense of great time and frustration.

To perform the redesign I used NetObjects Fusion 11 (NOF). I’ve known and watched this product for several years, never with great enthusiasm. To be blunt, NOF is mediocre. It’s not Microsoft, which is a plus, and it has cute graphics for some pre-cut Web site designs. It’s fairly easy to get your pages to look okay. To make the current version of this site, I had to do only an hour or so of graphics and other work, modifying the template that came with an earlier version of the software.

So what am I complaining about?

The answer is simple: the affordances in NOF are not very good. They’re as good as in Front Page and other typical Web site construction software, but they are still stupid and inadequate.

There actually existed, once in a far-off galaxy, long, long ago a really good Web site builder; there has never been anything even remotely like it. The product was called Trellix; it was the brainchild of none other than Dan Bricklin, the guy that gave us the original VisiCalc. In Trellix, all you had to do was drag and drop. If you had your browser window open next to the Trellix window, you could drag and drop from the browser’s URL line right into Trellix text and you got the right result - a link, correctly labeled with the Web page’s title, not the URL. The URL was in the <href> field of the link you just created.

Everything else in Trellix worked smoothly and efficiently, but it was not very good at making sexy-looking sites. This site was originally composed in Trellix (well, in its later version, as will be explained); one of the reasons I delayed years in revising the site was that Trellix’s FTP client did not handle updating to my Web server provider very well. In fact, not at all. And the site didn’t look very good by modern standards, but that was not a major issue for me.

Meanwhile, sometime around 2003 (I think), Trellix was sold to Globalscape, whose main product these days seems to be CuteFTP or something. Trellix was renamed “CuteSITE Builder” (heaven knows why the odd capitalization), and left to languish in obscurity. I faithfully bought all the updates until Globalscape discontinued the product altogether. You can still go to Globalscape’s page for Trellix aka CuteSITE Builder, but it won’t do you much good.

The history of software is littered with examples like Trellix - superb, well-conceived designs that no longer exist. I can think of many other examples, such as Star Office 5.2, with its astonishing (and wholly undocumented) truly object-oriented interface, or a nifty little Indian HTML editor named (I think) Tarantula, which did all its fine component positioning without graphics. There were once excellent development environments, such as the early versions of several flavors of Pascal, Modula-2, and even (ugh!) C++. One crucial feature of all of them was having good affordances.

What, you might ask is an “affordance”? Wikipedia has a fairly good article on the subject. Basically an affordance is an entity’s interface with a user. Some affordances are pretty simple and obvious - such as the handle of a saw. If you pick up the saw by its handle, and experiment with various movements, it isn’t too hard to get the idea of how to use the device, even if you never saw a saw (sorry!). Other devices don’t have such good affordances. Try the door locks in almost any recent-model automobile. The symptom of how bad these new designs are is that the car’s owner often has to explain to passengers how to unlock the door so they can get out.

Ah. We have come to the crucial point. The interface mechanism of car door locks was stable for some sixty or seventy years, until roughly 1985. It was not a wholly satisfactory system, but it was easy to learn to use, and it worked. Then stylists designed really good -looking door lock interfaces. And everyone had to relearn how to use them.

Why does this happen, you might ask? Why is it that we have a perfectly good device, such as Trellix or a car door lock, and then some bright person “fixes” it? The answer lies in large part in our social and economic systems that surround the design and production of all of our “products”. The way a person gets ahead is by getting favorable notice - or, at least, notice that looks favorable for long enough to get the bright young person promoted.

In other words, it is not the quality of ideas or the experience of those that encounter them that matters. It is how the ideas accumulate the aura of favorable notice.

Now that doesn’t sound so bad. But there is an interesting point to be made. How do you get ahead? Well, not usually just by having a good idea. You get ahead by having “contacts”. You get ahead by personal acquaintance. So I ask this: could a bright young person conspire with a “contact” (i.e., friend?) to create the illusion of that precious aura of improvement, when the substance is far different?

You say, “Oh, that could never happen in business. Only evil governments would do that!”. After all, government is inherently evil, isn't it?

Really? Well, look at Trellix. It was truly the work of a brilliant mind, and it was a product that worked superbly. And we no longer have it. We have Front Page. Yum, yum.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me