S60 Open to new features

A lot of the web is all about removing context. Digital content can be reused -- "repurposed", in the clumsier corporate argot. Here is a good cinematic treatment of the idea. This is certainly what browsers are about. If a web page can be said to have "a design", browsers don't really present that design so much as present an interpretation of the ideas behind the design.

If anything, this is an even stronger characteristic of browsers, like the S60 browser, that are designed for devices with unique characteristics. In our case the display is small and the input is limited. But you could imagine something using, for example, a monochrome vector display that would still be recognizable as a "web browser". In that case the characteristics of the device would be unique in a different way. You could even imagine a web browser that used a really unusual display mechanism. How about using a web page as a map for planting a flower garden? You plant the seeds and a few months later the flowers bloom and from above you can see the "page". Talk about latency...

Web designers generally accept the fact that their page designs are more like guidelines, and even celebrate it. It's certainly different, and in many cases exciting (empowering?) to create things in a dynamic medium. You can go the other way, too. As a designer or artist, you might decide that a work you want to convey depends not just on the words "this is not a pipe", but on those words being presented in a particular typeface in a particular size, color, and position. You can do that, but when you do, "the web" doesn't work quite as well. To control those things completely you might resort to one big jpg file instead of any text at all. You can certainly do that, of course, but there are costs. Searchability is one, and page size (and thus loading time, particularly on a mobile) is another. Art and communication are nothing if not sets of combined compromises, after all. And yet...

A big thing about the web is deconstruction. Let's call it "dismantling" to get away from any connotations of the term. A web page is called a "page" because it resembles a page in a book or newspaper. (That is why it's called a page, isn't it? Seems obvious, but I've been wrong before.) The characteristics of a printed page include words, typeface, size, absolute position, position relative to other items on the page, and sometimes various kinds of pictures. A printed page includes all those things together; they have fixed interrelationships. The page has its own context. A web page dismantles all those interrelationships. Each characteristic becomes a standalone thing that can be presented all by itself in different contexts. The text could become part of an RSS feed. An image can be used in any number of ways. As for the layout, typeface and the like, well, those things have meaning only in the context of their interrelationships. In other words, the meaning inherent in the context is lost in the process of dismantling.

There's always a context, of course. Just because text from a web page is presented via RSS doesn't mean it lacks context; it just acquires a new context. In other words, after deconstruction there's reconstruction with some new materials.

When the meaning of a page is “just the text”, that’s okay. It’s even an advantage, as the new context may work out better, changing the meaning in a useful way. An RSS feed may increase the importance of a news story, for example. In my own case, I’ve noticed some news items in feeds that I suspect I would have missed on the original page.

But sometimes pages are more than "just the text". Contextual meaning involves subtleties and nuance. Here's an example of a page that I think suffers when you start to dismantle it. You could reproduce the "factual" content of the page, I suppose, without much of the context. But something would be lost, and I think on a page with elegant, subtle design the loss is significant.

What I'm really arguing is that in some cases the natural web-centric process of dismantling all the aspects of content and reassembling them in other ways can be destructive. Creative distruction, you might say, but sometimes it makes me uneasy.

For much more depth on some of these ideas, have a look here.