I recently redesigned my portfolio and learned quite a lot from the process. While I could talk about how my knowledge of HTML and CSS has improved that is not really what I learned. What I learned is that the windows operating system, and specifically Internet Explorer, is doing more to destroy the aesthetic potential of the world than anything I have encountered to date.
Being a lighting designer I have learned to think in relative values of a single hue. You turn a light on to 30%, 50%, 70%, or Full and have the same color (ignoring, for the moment, red shift with incandescent lights). With LED’s you have exactly the same color, just a change in intensity. DMX protocols give out values of 0-255. Imagine my excitement when the woman who was coding my site told me you could make elements like text and background shapes transparent within a 0-255 range of values. Sound familiar?
So the site was coded using a palette of only four colors, but giving those colors various transparency values, to create the look of the site. It was amazing. Talking to the coder was like talking to a programmer on a live show, “Could we move that over a nudge and make it 10% dimmer?” If the text wanted to be dimmer, rather than guessing at hex values or hunting and pecking, we could just reduce the opacity.
Built on a Mac and tested in Safari, FIrefox, Camino, and Chrome, the website looked awesome. By Saturday of last week I thought we were ready to publish. My coder told me we were still several days away. I was confused until I learned that Internet Explorer 7, a web browser which was released one year after CSS3 standards came out, was incapable of reconciling a number of these values. Now that we had the website looking the way that we wanted, it was a matter of grabbing screen shots and finding the text colors in a hex value and creating a javascript file that would override the beautiful design for these deficient browsers.
It was not enough to do this for IE7 and earlier. Even the not yet released IE9 does not have full CSS3 support, but Microsoft is excited about it having CSS2 support. The site was coded using standards which have been around since 2005. That would be five years ago for those of you having trouble with time which, it seems, is the case of Microsoft. By not allowing its browser to parse these standards, Microsoft is not only making the design of websites more difficult for web designers, but it is diminishing the aesthetic potential of websites for clients and the web surfing public.
Most websites, to my eyes, look the same. Some of this is practical layout. It typically makes more sense to have a navigation bar at the top or side of a site for example. But a lot of this similarity is due to the fact that Microsoft has not upgraded its browser to accept, in computer years, the ancient technology of CSS3. What goes for exciting graphic design these days are rounded corners and drop shadows. I’m sorry but Apple figured this out back in the 1980s.
Simple things like transparency give a website style without calling attention to itself. By and large I hate flash. While it is a decent enough workaround for the inherent limitations of browsers like IE, its uses are so invasive in the realms of advertising that I can’t use the internet without my flash blockers on. This, of course, poses problems on sites where I really want information. I am blocked from accessing it and have to override constantly. But flash does allow you to work on crippled browsers like IE so I understand its allure.
Apple is not perfect. Nor is Firefox. There are plenty of things about the operating system and the browser that I would like to see improved. However, they typically err on the side of making for a more user friendly experience when given the chance. I like the OSX operating systems because I don’t have to think about the operating system to use my computer. I know many windows afficionados who pride themselves on how they can take apart and rebuild the physical computer as much as they want to. That’s awesome. I just want my machine to work. And further, because it works so well, I have no need to take it apart and rebuild it.
Same thing with Firefox. I don’t like it for the logo. I like the browser because I don’t have to think about the fact that I am using a web browser when surfing the internet. Websites look good and load fast. If I accidentally type a search term into the address bar instead of the search bar it gives me a search result that, eight times out of ten, is the site I was looking for.
Of equal importance to me as an artist, the aesthetic experience is better with these technologies. Colors render better and sites load faster, but more to the point there is a whole world of graphic design that is literally hidden from windows users. They go to the same URL but they get a deficient aesthetic experience. Even after we matched the colors for my portfolio and ran it in IE it did not have the same grace as it does on Firefox or Safari. Because while the hex value is really really close, it is not the same as the value of the text color at 65% transparency against the text box at 23% against the background color.
No user is going to notice this. But that is precisely why it is important. It is not like flash which is, as the name implies, flashy. It is about the subtile aspects of design that no one notices but everyone is affected by. As Jennifer Tipton has famously said of lighting, “only 10% of an audience notices the lighting but 99% are affected by it.”
Microsoft is just fine in a world of gross and imprecise aesthetics. I am not.
I want the world to be a more beautiful place when I leave it than it was when I entered. This is why I am an artist. But it is not only through art that this commitment is made. I want to live my life in such a way that the aesthetic experience of the world is heightened by my being in it. Encouraging even one person to abandon Internet Explorer in favor of FIrefox would help to achieve this goal.
