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Transferable Web
April 23rd, 2005
I’ve been working professionally in the web business for just under a decade, and I have witnessed some marvelous changes in our industry. I started out working with very narrowband, low-quality, minimal websites. We labored to get file sizes down to 40KB or less because most of our users had dial-up modems at very low speeds.
As time passed, more and more users adopted broadband, so we started offering images with less compression and larger sizes. Flash, video, and audio (especially MP3s) eventually had become on-demand and ubiquitous, as users now expect content to load immediately and travel with them in an instant.
Recently, web standards are mainstream. Every (yes, every) project we produce now in my shop uses web standards. They do not all validate to 100%, but they come very close. It seems now that the goal is to provide very sleek and clean minimal code to deliver high quality images, video, audio, and graphics. In essence, the container is very light itself, but it can hold content that is very heavy and extremely portable. Just look at how the framework of a website is likely still 20-40KB, while the images, graphics, and visual elements now exceed 100-300KB and beyond.
The combination of broadband, web standards, and accessibility has made the web extremely transferable. You can get it from anywhere, and take it with you everywhere.
I think the web is the most versatile channel of communication because it is accessible, portable, and transferable. I can take content from a website and seamlessly syndicate it to an RSS feed, print it out on paper and hand it to someone, email content directly to a friend, view it on a television, computer, PDA, video game station, while updating all of this material from one central location.
I wonder if this means that eventually the web will consume all other traditional modes of communication such as television, phone, radio, print, direct mail and others. Even as I type this I am thinking it already has in many ways. As I read about recent developments in our industry like how Adobe acquired Macromedia, Google and Yahoo! are in a bidding war to link up with Tivo, iPod madness, and the new Sony PSP handheld gaming device that comes with built-in wireless capabilities, I think this has already begun.
When is the last time you saved an image from your television and emailed it to a friend? You can’t. Well, unless you take a picture of the screen, it does not transfer to other modes of communication so easily like the web. Take the image in the entry for example – I had to take a photo of the television to get this image on my computer. How’s that for portable content?
The web is not just another fish in the sea of communication. It is the water.
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