English
Just a click away
Excerpt from the book 'Taschen's 1000 Favorite Websites'. By Julius Wiedemann
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Just a click away. That's the distance that separates us today from most of the surprises, information, solutions, contacts and experiences in this life of ours. And this simple click is in fact the path to our new e-lifestyle on the World Wide Web. After its initial development as a military communication resource, the web has grown and undergone numerous phases. In terms of design standards, the pages were at first constructed using nothing more than html; this was then followed by the script phase, during which people also discovered gif animations. This brought movement and visual dynamism to the web. Although they were sometimes annoying and took their time to download, gifs added a great deal of fun to the web. This innovation is now becoming the cult part on the web. Further experimentation centered on Flash, and it is still with us and getting stronger by the day, particularly for creative professionals who make their sites their window to the outside world. This phase started almost simultaneously with Shockwave, adding the possibility of interaction online, which has taken us to the phase in which we are now, where all these resources with moreover the addition of movies and sound are making the www even better than ever.
It terms of communications media, the Web has also gone though a lot of stages. The first could be defined as the curiosity stage. Few people had access at first and even fewer had pages. Things were happening very fast, but we could only get the necessary information from a very small handful of publications or from what we heard by word of mouth. The second phase was the informative stage, which was still not really about information-providing on the large scale, because it all took much too much time and required real professionals to make the pages. The corporations and website pioneers put in a great deal of work to get things to this point, and yet it was still only the beginning. But the seed had been planted and was growing. The third stage was about information proper, and now on a grand scale. Thanks to massive investments made by media corporations, not to mention the loss of billions of dollars, these companies started to transfer their material to the web, where they could now enjoy spectacular speed and quality. But the best thing was that this was all being made available for free on the net. Nobody could have imagined that such a flow of information would ever come and grow so rapidly. Corporations and governments joined forces and added a whole new world of online services. From e-commerce to government tax forms, users began to see the new possibilities of the massive move from offline to online service accessibility and exploit it.
Page [1] [2] [3]
Page [1] [2] [3]
Just a click away. That's the distance that separates us today from most of the surprises, information, solutions, contacts and experiences in this life of ours. And this simple click is in fact the path to our new e-lifestyle on the World Wide Web. After its initial development as a military communication resource, the web has grown and undergone numerous phases. In terms of design standards, the pages were at first constructed using nothing more than html; this was then followed by the script phase, during which people also discovered gif animations. This brought movement and visual dynamism to the web. Although they were sometimes annoying and took their time to download, gifs added a great deal of fun to the web. This innovation is now becoming the cult part on the web. Further experimentation centered on Flash, and it is still with us and getting stronger by the day, particularly for creative professionals who make their sites their window to the outside world. This phase started almost simultaneously with Shockwave, adding the possibility of interaction online, which has taken us to the phase in which we are now, where all these resources with moreover the addition of movies and sound are making the www even better than ever.
It terms of communications media, the Web has also gone though a lot of stages. The first could be defined as the curiosity stage. Few people had access at first and even fewer had pages. Things were happening very fast, but we could only get the necessary information from a very small handful of publications or from what we heard by word of mouth. The second phase was the informative stage, which was still not really about information-providing on the large scale, because it all took much too much time and required real professionals to make the pages. The corporations and website pioneers put in a great deal of work to get things to this point, and yet it was still only the beginning. But the seed had been planted and was growing. The third stage was about information proper, and now on a grand scale. Thanks to massive investments made by media corporations, not to mention the loss of billions of dollars, these companies started to transfer their material to the web, where they could now enjoy spectacular speed and quality. But the best thing was that this was all being made available for free on the net. Nobody could have imagined that such a flow of information would ever come and grow so rapidly. Corporations and governments joined forces and added a whole new world of online services. From e-commerce to government tax forms, users began to see the new possibilities of the massive move from offline to online service accessibility and exploit it.
Page [1] [2] [3]
