On Wed, Nov 06, 2002 at 02:43:02PM +0100, Juan David Ibáñez Palomar wrote:
> In general, I agree with him, in particular with the sentence
> "Designers still need to wade through code".

I think that this is the root of a big misunderstanding.  Web pages are
made up of at least *three* components, and one of them are entirely
separable from the others.  I'm also dubious of the implication that
designers of web pages can avoid wading through code, because web pages
seem to me to require at least three major design components, and they
have in general quite a lot of overlap:

There's the graphic design.

There's what we might call the "business logic".

And there is, or ought to be, the UI design.  This one usually gets
shortchanged even when it is actually considered by anyone - at least
that's what my own experience of the state of what's out there seems to
suggest.  Another possibility might be that UI design gets shorted
because everyone is building tools and infrastructures that divide
web design in two, when it, like Gaul, is actually trifurcated.

If you ignore UI design, you can delude yourself into imagining that
web design can be split into two mostly independent parts.  Of course
it never really divides entirely cleanly, but sometimes it works well
enough to make people think that if only they could find the *right*
templating language/design language/etc. they could achieve some sort
of perfect separation.

Oh, andOfCourse they would have a fine shot at making some real money,
or they would if the e-conomy ever gets its wheels firmly under it.

Obviously, I think these efforts are a little bit misguided.  The
really hard part of web design is resolving the inevitable conflicts
between the artistes, the needs of good UI design, and the logic
design.  If you don't try to pretend that UI either "just happens" or
can be thrown over the fence to the other guy, it's blindingly obvious
that things are all intermingled.  Sure, some bits can be sorted out,
and that's even useful - but that's at the implementation level, and
that's not the hard part of making web pages.

Then again, good design doesn't seem to be much desired, judging from
the majority of the sites I see.

Anyway, much of what I like about Quixote is that it doesn't waste its
effort, or clutter its design, with attempts to square the circle.  I
may be deluded, but I know what I like.  :-)

--
I'm not proud.  We really haven't done everything we could to
protect our customers ... Our products just aren't engineered
for security.  -- Brian Valentine, Microsoft Senior VP
                  in charge of the Windows development team