NEW MEDIA : One size does not fit all when each customer's needs can vary "All blanket advice about how to design web sites is by definition wrong." >BY Christopher J. Feola

NewsInc, Sept 27, 1999

Which is better: an avocado or an automobile?

Kind of depends on whether you're hungry or in a hurry, doesn't it?

Let's try again. Which is better: an orange or an orangutan?

That's just silly. Let's move on.

One more example. Which is better: Moby Dick or the Dallas Morning News?

Confused? Annoyed? Waiting for the point? Here it is.

Which is better: a lightweight web site designed to load like lightning on a 28.8-kbps modem, or a full-on, bells-and-whistles web multimedia extravaganza?

Here's where the opinions come out of the woodwork. Here's where all sorts of people are ready to lay down all sorts of iron-clad rules. "Yahoo! is the ultimate design." "Never use frames." "Never use Java." "Never use [insert your fav hot technology here: JavaScript, DHTML, streaming video and so forth]."

Meanwhile, there are almost as many so-called gurus claiming that no one will ever give your site a second look unless you have streaming, interactive, singing and dancing to make your site "sticky."

What's the truth? The truth is simple: We're back to, "Which is better: an avocado or an automobile?"

We have become used to designing one-size-fits-all publications. Even a heavily zoned newspaper produces a single edition for thousands of readers. So we tend to want the same kind of answers for on-line design -- how can we design that one-size-fits-all web site?

There are two problems with this approach. The first is that it doesn't work in print -- last time we checked, the population was booming, but newspaper circulation was not.

The second is that it is a complete misunderstanding of the 'Net. In the end, the 'Net is an audience of one. Each user is an audience in and of himself, or herself. You have to identify your audience, and cater to it.

Before you start designing your site for 28.8 modems, ask yourself: Are any of your users actually connecting that way? Have you done the research? Many news sites report that at least half of their users connect from their offices during business hours using high-speed local area network connections.

Don't you think we should design something for them?

The same question applies to multimedia implementations such as Flash and Dynamic HyperText Markup Language (DHMTL). Before you start designing pages geared to Netscape 2, why not check to see if any of your readers actually use it?

At DallasNews.com, 91 percent of our readers use a Version 4 or higher browser. Shouldn't we design something for them?

Remember, though, that this is the 'Net, so we are not looking at an either-or proposition. There are plenty of ways to check to determine what

browser your readers are using, and then serve them appropriately. One of the things a browser tells a server when a connection is made is exactly what piece of software it is. That knowledge then can be used to direct 4.x browsers to DHTML content, while older browsers can be directed to straight HyperText Markup Language pages.

Browser sniffers are old news. There's a new and better way emerging, however, called XHTML. This is a clever bit of work from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body which sets standards for the Web. The W3C has taken the HTML 4.x specification -- the latest and greatest -- and recreated it in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

XML is a metalanguage -- a language that is used to write other languages. That sounds uninteresting until you realize that it means you can write your own tags and use them immediately, rather than waiting for Netscape and Microsoft to agree on things.

But here's the really clever bit: By implementing all of the HTML 4.x spec and including it in XHTML, the W3C has built something that fails gracefully. In other words, XML-compliant browsers see and use all the bells and whistles, while older browsers see nothing but plain old HTML.

Older browsers don't have a problem with all the cool new features because older browsers see what appears to be programmers' comments, which they ignore.

All this technical detail should not be allowed to obscure the larger point, however: All blanket advice about how to design web sites is by definition wrong. Indeed, it is even a misnomer to say that each user is an audience of one. Each user is a new audience of one with each log on.

Think about it: The user who accesses your site over her office T-1 line in the morning, over her Palm VII wireless in the afternoon and from her home 56-kbps modem in the evening may all be the same person, but are they all the same audience? They may want streaming video over the T-1, but do you think they want it on their Palm VII?

Sometimes you need an avocado. Sometimes you need an automobile.