Unfinished Business
Posted on this Saturday, July 12, 2008 21:44 by caw
Filed Under cawilliams.us | Leave a Comment
It seems like the vast majority of web sites – mine included – are unfinished, a work-in-progress. Or at least they feel that way. It’s like you’re building a house and there’s one room you never got painted. Why is that? I would like to posit a couple of reasons.
First, the web is by nature dynamic and transient. You can’t reach out and touch it which means it’s difficult to know when something is done. It’s why writers keep tinkering with a story, painters keep adding a few more finishing touches. "Done" becomes more like "good enough." Of course, everyone has a different idea of what good enough is.
Shiny is another reason. Call it the geek factor. Flash, AJAX, Java, HTML, CSS, XML, the list is endless. Every day there’s something new and if it’s new it must be better, right? Notionally, many of these technologies are simple (HTML for content, CSS for presentation) but when it comes to using them they turn out to be more complex. And because they are complex, we get bogged down and things never quite get finished.
I wonder how much personality has to do with it. Some people are big picture types where others focus on the details. My wife is a details kind of person. Her sewing projects are always nicely finished, all the threads clipped and the corners turned out. I’m not that way. Once the designing is done, I want to move on to something new rather than debug the code. Maybe that’s why as a photographer, I want it right in the camera. I don’t want to deal with it in post-processing. I’d rather get the right exposure, not Photoshop it.
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