Web Design: Would you design a PDF by writing Postscript in Notepad?

[dorayme]

The core of Saussure's analysis could be said to be that signs
("elements" in our world) have two aspects: signifier and signified. The
signifier is the sound or symbol with which we express them and the
signified is the concept we actually mean behind them. Only the
signifier is immediately obvious, but only the signified conveys real
meaning.

Be careful of this continental stuff, Andy, they like reinventing
wheels and adding epicycles and in their factories, some anti
Ockham principle seems the main guide, and, for good measure, a
device to add great fat dollops of pure obscurantism (in
Australia, we call it bullshit).

There are words and sentences and these have meanings. We do not
need some third ghostly intermediary called a concept. What do
you really think the concept of "is" is? It has a meaning but you
will not find it conveniently in some object. My cat has a name
and this name refers to the actual cat. There is a cat and there
is a word. And there is how the word is used.

The whole terminology of "signifier" and "signified" is
hopelessly based on false ideas. "is" and "it" and a million
other things do not signify in any useful meaning of this word.
Remember, we already have a set of words: "words", "sentences",
"equations", "meaning" and many others in the English language
and no doubt in Continental languages. Be sure that if you are
going to use special terminology, it is an enhancement that has a
real utility.

"only the signified conveys real meaning"? What? You mean there
is the signifier (that has meaning, it sounds like it refers to
something that has a function of some sort). And there is the
signified. The signified, says you, also has meaning. Or it is
the thing that really has the meaning. Forget the lot. It will
not be missed.

I shudder to think of a panel of folks making a wsiwig anything
steeped in this sort of thing...

 

[TaliesinSoft]

I agree that your site is simple enough to justify to some extent, your
confidence in it. But what I am saying and what others are suggesting to you
will more and more come into its own as you make other sites. The approach
you are taking will become to have more severe limitations as you contemplate

more website pages and sites.

I'll accept that there are things that Freeway Pro cannot do in terms of
describing a website, but I'll also state that the number of times I have
felt constrained are few. Freeway Pro is not a static application and as time
progresses so will Freeway in terms of its capabilities. But what I consider
most important of all is that Freeway allows me to work in a manner in which
I am comfortable, working visually instead of technically. And, a nice aspect
of working with such as Freeway is that if a new release arrives with better
code generation all I need to do is to re upload my websites to take
advantage of it.

Screens really do have a very diverse range of sizes and setting out there...

quite aside from the extremes.

There are indeed a variety of screen sizes in use, but according to the
latest statistics some 80% of computers in use today have a resolution
appropriate for my Adams site, appropriate in the sense that horizontal
scrolling is not be necessary.

 

[William Mitchell]

I'll accept that there are things that Freeway Pro cannot do in terms of
describing a website, but I'll also state that the number of times I have
felt constrained are few. Freeway Pro is not a static application and as time
progresses so will Freeway in terms of its capabilities. But what I consider
most important of all is that Freeway allows me to work in a manner in which
I am comfortable, working visually instead of technically. And, a nice aspect

Well, as long as you aren't doing anything more complicated than this
one, it should do fine.

 

[TaliesinSoft]

[commenting on my use of Freeway and on the Ansel Adams website I created
using Freeway]

Well, as long as you aren't doing anything more complicated than this
one, it should do fine.

Freeway can deal with website structures far more complex than those I chose
to use.

(Directed to William Mitchell} Have you actually used Freeway? If so, what
limitations did it impose on you. Were these limitations, if there were any,
such that there weren't alternative methods with Freeway to use instead?

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

[commenting on my use of Freeway and on the Ansel Adams website I created
using Freeway]

Well, as long as you aren't doing anything more complicated than this
one, it should do fine.

Freeway can deal with website structures far more complex than those I chose
to use.

You espouse such virtue of this software, but neither your site nor any
that the software publisher promotes in their gallery demonstrates that
it shortcomings shared by all WYSIWYG editors. It is just not that good.
Obviously you have fallen in love with it but it does not produce very
good markup.

(Directed to William Mitchell} Have you actually used Freeway? If so, what
limitations did it impose on you. Were these limitations, if there were any,
such that there weren't alternative methods with Freeway to use instead?

Your style should be separate from the markup. In a separate file
preferably.

 

[TaliesinSoft]

You espouse such virtue of this software, but neither your site nor any that
the software publisher promotes in their gallery demonstrates that it
shortcomings shared by all WYSIWYG editors. It is just not that good.
Obviously you have fallen in love with it but it does not produce very good
markup.

To be honest, I don't care what's under the skin, but I care greatly that the
end user, a user using one of many browsers with their default settings, can
view my site as I intended it to be seen.

 

[Ben C]

Be careful of this continental stuff, Andy, they like reinventing
wheels and adding epicycles and in their factories, some anti
Ockham principle seems the main guide, and, for good measure, a
device to add great fat dollops of pure obscurantism (in
Australia, we call it bullshit).

There are words and sentences and these have meanings. We do not
need some third ghostly intermediary called a concept. What do
you really think the concept of "is" is? It has a meaning but you
will not find it conveniently in some object. My cat has a name
and this name refers to the actual cat. There is a cat and there
is a word. And there is how the word is used.

The best definition of concept I've heard (which is possibly
Wittgenstein's idea) is "knowing how to use a word". You possess the
concept of a cat if you know how to use the word "cat". This works for
all words (including ones like "ouch").

Which amounts to pretty much what you said. I agree that the "signified
thing", unless we just mean the cat itself, is skating on very thin ice.

But credit to AD for explaining it so clearly. I never had the faintest
idea what those people like Saussure were on about and anyone I asked to
explain always disappeared like turtles into their black turtlenecks at
the first sign of logic.

But the distinction actually works a lot better, even to the point of
working at all, applied to HTML than it ever did applied to natural
language. The "what I signify is what I get" editor has a future.

 

[Ben C]

I'm not surprised - neologism always tends to do this.

In Saussure's langue / parole model, "content" is the underlying langue
and HTML code is the visible but less vital parole. "Signified" and
"signifier", if you prefer the terms that are usually applied to "signs"
(as HTML elements would be termed in linguistics or semiotics).

Wiki is good on philosophy and linguistics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism


No, I mean a lower level than this. The simpler, nmore obvious level is
the HTML, the expression of a set of elements applied to specific usages
in one page's situation. The deeper level represents the structure that
re-occurs between pages in a site and is expressed through the same
recurrent groupings of element-meanings. It's hard to describe this any
more clearly because it is simply hard to do so -- our problem is that
we must first invent terminology to do it with.

So are we basically saying this: HTML is a language full of terms like
"paragraph", "list", "heading". But if I'm making a music download page,
say, my information might be organized in some other structure:
"artist", "album", "details" etc.

So I might approach this with things like <p class="details">. And/or I
might store my data in some other XML language which actually has
elements like <details>, which I transform into HTML.

So what I'm trying to signify is artist/album, but all I have to signify
it with is HTML (heading/paragraph/etc.)?

But in other cases, it's not so obvious what the real structure of my
data is. But if I could find it, perhaps I could organize my site better.

[...]

It's famously difficult to read Saussure in the original (It was written
after he was dead, which is always hard on an author).

It is hard to write once you're dead.

Thanks for the explanation.

 

[Andy Dingley]

(in Australia, we call it bullshit).

That's why the two most important publications in post-modernist
theory are Sokal's
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics
of Quantum Gravity"

and "Social Text"'s commentary on having published it
"its status as parody does not alter substantially our interest in the
piece itself as a symptomatic document."

There's no shortage of sociological bollocks out there, and it's our
responsibility to dispel it with our Flaming Clueirons of
Righteousness ((c) Jonathan Aitken)

There are words and sentences and these have meanings. We do not
need some third ghostly intermediary called a concept.

Of course we do! As a HTML author, haven't you felt its acute lack?
My overall point here, in all these thousands of words, is that good
HTML authoring practice demonstrates the validity of the Structuralist
approach (at least within this narrow field). There _is_ an underlying
and hidden "concept" within our sites and shared between our pages.
Good authors are already recognising this (if unconsciously) and are
using it as a binding post for CSS presentation groupings. Making this
subtlety manifest represents the education of less skillful authors.
Making it automatically processable is a direction for useful progress
in authoring tools.

The whole terminology of "signifier" and "signified" is
hopelessly based on false ideas.

Which are?

"only the signified conveys real meaning"? What?

Yes. That's what we define it to mean. We invent these new term-usages
and we define them as "expression of" and "thing expressed". Thus far
I don't see much scope for bollockspeakery. Signifiers don't have
meaning, they just point to the thing that does carry the meaning.
Sometimes this pointed direction is short and direct, sometimes it's
vague and torturous.

As it is, a simplified "60-Minutes" English has no ability to discuss
such concepts. I totally and utterly reject any attempt to make me
stupid by limiting the language I can use to express thought (this is
one reason I don't own a TV). Humpty Dumpty was right, sometimes you
have to make words mean whatever you wish them to mean, but you have
to do this carefully and to take notes of how you did use them so that
others can follow.

I shudder to think of a panel of folks making a wsiwig anything

That's the camel design problem though, not the concept. Although
fluffy concepts often have turned into radical new (and useful)
products they've usually been the conceptual work of one person. It's
hard to organise committees anyway, trying to organise them aroudn
something so vague and hard to quantify as well would be impossible.

BenC> You possess the concept of a cat if you know how to use the word "cat".

With cats, that's all you get to possess.

 

[mike flugennock]

If sinkers.org is your product of your efforts then "close" is not what
I would say...

Actually, sinkers.org was originally built about ten years ago with a
combination of HotMetalPro (just OK) and the HTML module in BBEdit (way
better); both were pretty much the HTML equivalent of hand-coding the
PostScript for a print layout.

I've spent some months experimenting with Dreamweaver, getting
comfortable with it, so that I can pull down the old sinkers.org design
and design something a little "leaner" and not quite so graphics-heavy.

And yes, it is a pretty simple site, as I'm a designer and not a
programmer, so I wanted to design something that mainly focuses on the
artwork, fotos and video pieces and not fancy code tricks, and which I
can revise/update pretty much in my sleep.

When designing sites for actual clients, I work with a team of coders
and programmers who I'm in close touch with, as I used to do (and still
do) with print-shop crews back in the ancient times.

--

..

"Though I could not caution all, I yet may warn a few:
Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools!"

--grateful dead.
_______________________________________________________________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
"Mikey'zine": dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

 

[mike flugennock]

If sinkers.org is your product of your efforts then "close" is not what
I would say...

sinkers.org was originally built nearly ten years ago with a combination
of HotMetalPro (just OK) and the HTML editor in BBEdit (much better),
both of which were the HTML equivalent of hand-coding an entire print
page layout in PostScript.

I've been spending some months experimenting and getting up to speed
with Dreamweaver so that I can redesign sinkers.org and rebuild it
entirely with it.


--

..

"Though I could not caution all, I yet may warn a few:
Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools!"

--grateful dead.
_______________________________________________________________
Mike Flugennock, flugennock at sinkers dot org
"Mikey'zine": dubya dubya dubya dot sinkers dot org

 

[Ed Mullen]

To be honest, I don't care what's under the skin, but I care greatly that the
end user, a user using one of many browsers with their default settings, can
view my site as I intended it to be seen.

Understood. And I wouldn't necessarily argue with you in this case.
However, even knowing what screen resolution a visitor is using tells
you nothing about the actual size of the page view pane. For instance,
I use 1280 x 1024, my browser is always maximized. Here is how my
browser is virtually always visually configured:

http://edmullen.net/temp/cap01.jpg

As you can see, even with the higher than average resolution I use the
actual available page pane size requires horizontal scrolling with your
design. A design where the thumbnails flow without requiring hor
scrolling would be better for me.

Beautiful photos, by the way.

--
Ed Mullen
http://edmullen.net
http://mozilla.edmullen.net
http://abington.edmullen.net
Assphasia- a condition where your face looks so much like your butt your
bowels don't know which way to move.

 

[dorayme]

That's why the two most important publications in post-modernist
theory are Sokal's

It did no good except entertain us all, people reaching high
honours in postmodernist courses on the continent still get
professorships in otherwise reputable universities. It is like
religion, no amounts of argument or parody or anything else can
make the slightest dent in its proliferations... Its attractions
have to do with the penchant of people loving the feeling of
sounding intellectual. It is simply sad and I don't really want
to get going on this too much, when would I stop?

Of course we do! As a HTML author, haven't you felt its acute lack?

No, I most definitely have not. My problems have always been low
level technical ones (guess why I am really here?), not chasing
after ghosts.

My overall point here, in all these thousands of words, is that good
HTML authoring practice demonstrates the validity of the Structuralist
approach (at least within this narrow field). There _is_ an underlying
and hidden "concept" within our sites and shared between our pages.

We are at cross purposes here. I was referring to a lack of need
of an intermediary between a word or sentence and its meaning.
You are talking about what might be common features across pages,
various template notions. These have various levels of
sophistication as can be seen by trying to identify what might be
common:

A young child will see they "all have the same same picture of a
frog at the very top"

An older child will see that "all have the same picture of a frog
at the very top and the same text bigger and blacker than the
rest"

A teenager will notice the common shapes and areas, and even the
functions of the areas "the left bits are all links so you can
get around the site"

And it goes on and on and on. There is no fantastic, magical
language that has been invented, and certainly not from the
European philosophers to make any of this easy or clear in a
general fashion.

Bottom line, I know, it does not matter, who am I, I simply flat
disbelieve the usefulness of your "European" studies to help out
in this matter. I think you have enough natural abilities and
insights to do quite without these mumbo jumbo linguistic
superstructures.

Good authors are already recognising this (if unconsciously)

With respect, you are entrenching a confusing idea. They are not
recognising some ghostly object called a concept. They are
recognising patterns and similarities. These are things we know
about in general and various specialists in various fields
identify them in particular. They are extremely interesting and
valuable in different ways to different people in different
fields. But there is no one thing they all are: concepts. It is
an unfortunate and confusing terminolgy.

....

Which are?

I gave you some in last post. In general, we all know after only
some reflection that there is a difference between a word, for
example, and its meaning. To try to generalise this across all
words and signs and sentences and (help! webpages) into the
terminology of the "signifier" and "signified" gives no new
insight about what the various relationships are. They are so
diverse, so dependent on context that this terminology lulls us
into a naively false perception. I can simply see you shoring up
this great illusion with your use of "concept" What is common to
the signified? Ah... a concept. It is all bullshit. You do not
need this language.

Yes. That's what we define it to mean. We invent these new term-usages
and we define them as "expression of" and "thing expressed". Thus far
I don't see much scope for bollockspeakery. Signifiers don't have
meaning, they just point to the thing that does carry the meaning.

This is just false. They point to no such thing. There is no such
thing. It is an illusion you are chasing, a ghost. There is no
"thing" that carries the meaning in most cases. The closest you
will ever get to a thing being "meant" is a proper name and the
thing named. And even then, the name does not mean the object.
But at this point, I better stop, no?

Sometimes this pointed direction is short and direct, sometimes it's
vague and torturous.

As it is, a simplified "60-Minutes" English has no ability to discuss
such concepts. I totally and utterly reject any attempt to make me
stupid by limiting the language I can use to express thought (this is
one reason I don't own a TV). Humpty Dumpty was right, sometimes you
have to make words mean whatever you wish them to mean, but you have
to do this carefully and to take notes of how you did use them so that
others can follow.



That's the camel design problem though, not the concept.

I'm sorry to sound so disagreable, but again, no. It was not the
camel problem I was really shuddering at. A bunch of people using
the language you favour, would just make the venture even harder
than it would be if just you used it. I would still shudder for
you.

 

[Ben C]

This is just false. They point to no such thing. There is no such
thing. It is an illusion you are chasing, a ghost. There is no
"thing" that carries the meaning in most cases. The closest you
will ever get to a thing being "meant" is a proper name and the
thing named. And even then, the name does not mean the object.
But at this point, I better stop, no?

If you want, but you make the case well.

Continental philosophobabble or not though, the authoring tool idea does
sound interesting.

I'm not sure how it would work. It reminds me of Roget's Thesaurus.
Everyone just looks things up in the index when they want a long word,
but if you read the introduction, the book is supposed to be something
much more ambitious: the inverse of a dictionary. You start with the
meaning and look up the word, using a hierarchical classification
starting with "Abstract Relations", "Space", "Matter", "Volition", etc.

 

[dorayme]

If you want, but you make the case well.

Continental philosophobabble or not though, the authoring tool idea does
sound interesting.

I'm not sure how it would work. ...

No one is sure how these things should work. My point has been
that no help can be expected from certain quarters (mainly
cumbersome obscure linguistic theories). If website making is to
retain an ability to express information and style to accommodate
all the important varying criteria without railroading the
process into something that severely stifles creativity, then we
are going to have to solve problems of a very much bigger order
of magnitude than is supposed by the naively idealistic. The
problem is a deep one to do with machines understanding meaning.

AI has been in its "infancy" for a long time now and for very
good reason. We have little idea about the operating system of
the animal brain, we have some knowledge of the hardware but only
in a rudimentary way - the truth being that we never will be able
to describe the hardware properly without the descriptions being
informed by a better theory about the overall "operating system".

It is not that there is no operating system, there is, imo at
least. And a spectacularly sophisticated one. It is that
something as complex as the human brain in particular, that took
countless millions of years to develop, is not likely to be
simple to understand. There was no Steve Jobs or Bill Gates with
the plans and intentions and the implementation codes.

I do not doubt that a WYSIWIG that combines a practical
collection of all the best that is in Dreamweaver, Freeway and
what have you is going to be useful or time saving. I just think
that given all the different things folk want to publish, there
will be for quite some time a need for a lot of specific user
hand holding controls.

Let me put it simply, if not accurately: the user will still need
to tell the machine that this or that is a paragraph or group of
paras.

While I am at it, have you noticed how every few days if not
every day on this ng, someone will ask how to automate this or
that? There are sometimes nice replies, sometimes pie in the sky
ones. All sorts of handy little tricks and tips and helpers are
offered. The best we will do for a while is to have whole
collections of specialist programs that do simple things well. To
learn how to use them and use judgement. I am pessimistic that
one program can coordinate all these things, can take over the
"judgement" part for the foreseeable future.

 

[Ben C]

No one is sure how these things should work. My point has been
that no help can be expected from certain quarters (mainly
cumbersome obscure linguistic theories). If website making is to
retain an ability to express information and style to accommodate
all the important varying criteria without railroading the
process into something that severely stifles creativity, then we
are going to have to solve problems of a very much bigger order
of magnitude than is supposed by the naively idealistic. The
problem is a deep one to do with machines understanding meaning.

AI has been in its "infancy" for a long time now and for very
good reason. We have little idea about the operating system of
the animal brain, we have some knowledge of the hardware but only
in a rudimentary way - the truth being that we never will be able
to describe the hardware properly without the descriptions being
informed by a better theory about the overall "operating system".

Agree re "AI" and the fact that we're nowhere near a program that can
understand the user's intentions, also that cumbersome obscure
linguistic theories are unlikely to help much with that.

I don't know exactly what AD had in mind, or what current tools do
anyway. But I think the way to do it is to watch what good web authors
do and turn that into a tool. One that tries to replicate their
processes, not their intelligence. So a tool with actions to reclassify
and organize the information, rather than one that just pretends to be a
word processor or DTP, might work. Part of that might be actions in the
tool to author the "meta-structure" not just the structure, which is
where the obscure theories came in-- taken totally out of context, where
they made little or no sense, into one where they might make some.

[...]

While I am at it, have you noticed how every few days if not
every day on this ng, someone will ask how to automate this or
that? There are sometimes nice replies, sometimes pie in the sky
ones. All sorts of handy little tricks and tips and helpers are
offered. The best we will do for a while is to have whole
collections of specialist programs that do simple things well.

Even better than that a recognition that operating a computer for all
but the simplest tasks usually comes down to programming it in some
form.

You get much further with computers if you understand roughly what they
actually do, which is run programs. I've seen people invent recursive
programming for themselves using circular references in spreadsheets,
and a lot of creativity with search and replace and keyboard macros from
people who didn't realize they were programmers.

To learn how to use them and use judgement. I am pessimistic that one
program can coordinate all these things, can take over the "judgement"
part for the foreseeable future.

Exactly right. Good tools don't hide what you're actually doing or try
to do the things you have to do for yourself, but they can give you
hints and prompts about the stuff you have to do, and help with the
details.

 

[dorayme]

I don't know exactly what AD had in mind, or what current tools do
anyway. But I think the way to do it is to watch what good web authors
do and turn that into a tool. One that tries to replicate their
processes, not their intelligence.

The author still has to direct the traffic, he or she needs to
know which processes to initiate when. Which is what we do now
with all our gismos. And of course, I have not denied we will get
better gismos. Either collected into one software package or not.

So a tool with actions to reclassify
and organize the information, rather than one that just pretends to be a
word processor or DTP, might work. Part of that might be actions in the
tool to author the "meta-structure" not just the structure, which is
where the obscure theories came in-- taken totally out of context, where
they made little or no sense, into one where they might make some.

There is a distinction in the process of creating anything,
especially in the field of ideas, between the psychological
conditions for discovery of something and the more objective
worth of the product. If you look at how Kepler or even Newton,
proceeded, you could be excused for wondering how such screwballs
could have come up with such astoundingly valuable final ideas.

There are two things going on, one of which we know only a little
about, the other a fair amount. The psychological processes are
the little. Kepler and Newton had their heads screwed right on in
their final assessments, in their recognition of the true worth
of their ideas. But how they came to have those ideas is a very
interesting and much more unclear process.

To put it simply, if AD and like minded people get inspiration
and ideas from various linguistic theories to produce web design
algorithms that make life easier for us all, good for them. Their
screwball psychological processes keep company with a whole
history of genius. <g>

There is a big difference too between someone saying that they
used some theory to invent a new application and that theory
being a real basis for the application. The application might as
easily have been the product of someone who had never heard of
the theory. Indeed, the very same person might just have a knack
or other ways of proceeding for these things and falsely
attributes his success to the theory.

The proof, in the end, is in the eating of the pudding.