Taking Your Talent to the Web- P4:It was a simple solution to a complex problem. On one side, thousands of designers and art directors are eager to take their talents to the Web but aren’t sure how. On the other, web agencies could not find enough good web designers to get their work done. | 26 WHY Designing for the Medium Web Agnosticism Complicating the issue many of today s web standards were yesterday s proprietary innovations things that worked only in one browser or another. You can t blame Wendy s for not offering McDonald s secret sauce and you can t fault browser companies for failing to implement technology invented by their competitors. When Netscape unveiled FRAMES the ability to place one web page inside another the technology was widely adopted by designers and developers. Refer back to Figure for an example of the way frames work. The bottom frame contains a menu the top frame contains the content. Clicking the menu changes the content by loading a new content frame. Both frames are controlled by yet a third document called the FRAMESET which links to the frames establishes their size and positioning relative to one another and determines such niceties as whether or not the user can resize a given frame. Eventually Netscape brought its invention to the W3C. Much later it ended up as part of a temporary standard the HTML 4 Transitional Recommendation. It took Microsoft a while to support frames because Microsoft s browser developers had to reverse-engineer Netscape s invention to figure out how it worked. Ironically enough Microsoft s browser eventually supported frames better than Netscape s. In 1995 Netscape came up with a programming language initially called LiveScript and eventually renamed JavaScript. Besides being easy to learn at least as far as programming languages go JavaScript made web pages far more dynamic. And it did this without straining the computers used to serve web pages servers because the technology worked in the user s browser instead of having to be processed by the server itself the way Perl scripts and other traditional programming languages had been. With less strain on the server more web pages could be served faster. Thus JavaScript was bandwidth-friendly. JavaScript eventually became a
