In the Web 1.0 world, if your page had something missing, or a feature didn’t work right, webmasters used an “Under Construction” graphic. There were only about 25 different .gif files permitted for this use, 24 of which were animated .gifs. The practice was widely adopted as a throwback to the then-endangered brick-and-mortar world. However, soon webmasters became far too clever for their own good, and the Under Construction images fell into a pit of wordplay and irony that they have not escaped from even today.
More information about Under Construction images: http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gk/atwork/
With the invention of Web 2.0, the Under Construction image was replaced by a much simpler tag: “Beta.” The Beta tag didn’t simply indicate a missing feature as the Construction tags did, but additionally carried a sweeping forgiveness for any and all errors encountered during the entire browsing experience. If a designer was unsure of the site’s completeness but didn’t know how to indicate it, he or she could simply add a small starburst to the site’s headmast that said Beta, and the users would have no right to complain about poor performance or lack of functionality.
Find out if your site meets the Web 2.0 standards! http://www.certifyr.com/
It was recently discovered that the general population has no idea what Beta actually means, so the designation has started to lose popularity. Additionally, due to the widespread fame of MySpace, the general public no longer expects the Internet to function correctly anyway. Errors, timeouts, and data loss are not only accepted, they are expected from any popular website. This has allowed designers the freedom to spend less time on bug checking and quality assurance, and focus their time on more important tasks such as discovering new ways to style a rounded rectangle.
Futurists have speculated that soon websites will serve no purpose whatsoever except to proliferate design trends and promote new frameworks. Rather than spend time creating content, administrators will focus their efforts on creating meta-pages that contain a framework for web services to push content through a rich agile platform utilizing community-driven validated callbacks. This should greatly simplify the creation of web applications, because it removes virtually all human interaction with the Internet.
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October 8th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
wats all dis stuff meannn?
December 21st, 2007 at 4:11 pm
The part where you say, “focus their time on more important tasks such as discovering new ways to style a rounded rectangle.” made Laugh Out Loud because it’s absolutely true. I don’t know what is it, but nowadays your site looks updated if you don’t throw in a few rounded corners. I personally feel they’re a waste of load time.