Static and Dynamic Media
Static Media
Once upon a time there was paper.
Wonderful stuff. I served my apprenticeship as a papermaker so I have no argument with it
One advantage - but also a problem - with paper is that it is static. Once you write or draw something on it, that's it, it doesn't change. If you cut 3 inches off the right side of the sheet, the text won't reformat to adapt to the new width, you'll simply lose the bit you cut off.
Designers loved it. It meant they had complete control over how things looked. A magazine page would look exactly the same to every person who looked at it. The designer would decide how the text and pictures should best be displayed and the only contribution the rest of us would make would be to sit back and gasp in admiration.
If you had visual problems, you had a choice. Use strong magnifiers or get someone to read it to you. If you were blind, your choices were even fewer.
It stayed that way from the invention of print until the latter half of the 20th century, when someone threw a huge spanner in the design works by inventing a method of displaying text and images on a monitor screen and giving the user the ability to change how it looked.
For the first time in history, control of final presentation lay not in the hands of the designer but in the hands of the reader. The reader could decide to see the text in a bigger font size, they could use a different font, they could even change the colour of the text or the background if they so wished.
Dynamic Media
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, this revolutionary new concept of reader control was allowed for and built into the heart of it. The designer would present the content, with suggestions as to how that content should be presented to make it most useful, but the ultimate control would rest with the user.
It had to!
Unless computer manufacturers deliberately built their machines to prevent the user from making any changes to their own computer display, there was no way of preventing the user from making such adjustments.
War broke out.
Old-style designers still stuck in the sheet-of-paper Static display mindset tried to turn reality on its head. Like the Luddites of an earlier time, rather than accept that the world had changed and trying to understand and adapt to the changes, they reacted by yelling at those working to the new concept that they were being "old-fashioned" and "boring" in rejecting many of the fixed Static display concepts as they simply no longer worked in the new revolutionary world of fluid Dynamic display.
Obsessed with trying to make sure that the end user saw exactly what they had decided the end user should see in the way they had decided they should see it, they began to abuse all kinds of potentially-useful add-ons, like Javascript and Flash, not as optional extras to enhance presentation but as absolute requirements for accessing their information.
And if the user chose not to surrender control to them in this way, then the user would see nothing at all.
The dictionary term for that is "petulance".
The colloquial term is "chucking your teddies out of the pram".
The more desperately control-freaked even began converting blocks of text into graphics to prevent flexibility and eliminate user control. They refused to understand that it might look fine on their system but that if someone was using a narrower window (or, increasingly, a hand-held device or mobile phone) to view the page then half their graphic might not be visible and their text therefore unreadable.
This kind of designer remained utterly impervious to reason and instead of seeing Dynamic presentation as a new challenge to open up new possibilities, they cursed the new opportunities as "limitations" and "restrictions" and regarded them as obstacles to be eliminated.
The Future
Dynamic media are here to stay, and while there will always be circumstances where the use of Static media will be necessary, Dynamic media will become the norm. The whole game of design in the presentation of information has changed forever and, quite honestly, the only real comment one can make to those dinosaurs who still want to force the limitations of the old mindset of Static presentation onto the new Dynamic media is, "Welcome to the 21st century - develop new skills or become redundant."
Spending time and effort in producing visually-pleasing presentation is, and will always be, a vital part of web page construction - but designers are going to have to learn to let go of the desire for absolute control of such presentation and accept that the final say now rests with the end user and that, for example, what the designer decides should be a 10pt green font on a black background may be easily overridden by the end user's own default preferences and show up on their screen as a 14pt red font on a turquoise background. Throwing a tantrum and telling them their choices are stupid won't make them change - they'll simply curse your arrogance and go somewhere else and you've just pissed off and lost a visitor/customer.
Instead of making it impossible for the user to view your page unless they change their preferences to suit your chosen scheme, web designers must learn that it is a fundamental skill of designing in a Dynamic medium to allow for the possibility of infinite variation in user preferences.
Here's the bottom line.
You have not the slightest control - and you have no right to try to control - how someone else has their computer set up.
If you really need to have that level of control, go design for magazines or television. It just doesn't work in Dynamic media.
Designers who wish to work in Dynamic media have to lose the control-freak mindset which says "You are only getting the information on this page if you accept it in the presentation I have decided on" and learn to apply their skills and ingenuity to building pages which might look wonderful if the user accepts the designer's presentation scheme but where the page content will still at least be readable if they don't or can't.
And the only way to guarantee that is by building standards-compliant websites.