The Ultimate Web Page

Sometimes people hit an idea right on the nose. My wife brought home this comic strip and it's so pertinent to what we do.

Sister - "Mom says you're designing a web page for school.

Little brother - "Yup."

"And not just any web page, but the ultimate web page."

"I'm using every tool in the box. HTML... XHTML... CSS... XML... SOAP... AJAX... Flash... Perl... JavaScript... you name it."

Sister - "What's the page going to look like?"

Little brother - "I'll figure that out when I'm done."

- Fox Trot

It's funny because it's true. We often put the technology horse in front of the cart. It's not about building the solution before there's a problem. It's about having a problem and using the right technology to solve that problem.

Now excuse me while I decide what Ajax/JavaScript/CSS widget I can add to my site...

Published September 19, 2006
Categorized as Other
Short URL: https://snook.ca/s/674

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17 Comments · RSS feed
Thame said on September 19, 2006

Great minds think alike, huh :)

Kumar said on September 19, 2006

hahaa... wicked!

Jonathan E said on September 19, 2006

Very nice!

Andy Kant said on September 19, 2006

I love the geek messages that are hidden in Fox Trot. There's one where Jason has a bowl of cereal with 1's and 0's in it that forms bytes in binary and if you convert it to ASCII it spells "nerd" or something like that.

I think Ruby on Rails is a great example of choosing a technology because its a buzzword rather than its application towards a solution. Don't get me wrong, Ruby is probably my favorite language now that I have experienced it and using Rails is alot of fun...but the lack of good documentation, third party libraries, and poor performance (relative to other web technologies) keeps me from using it for much.

Steven said on September 19, 2006

Haha, I read that one this morning in the paper.

Fredrik Wärnsberg said on September 19, 2006

I don't see why people are complaining so much about rails' performance. I'd like to see some tests of Django or Cake and compare how they perform. After all, when you're dealing with webapps you spend most time waiting for the database anyway.

Nate K said on September 20, 2006

Said perfectly. Thats great.

Adam Spooner said on September 20, 2006

That comic reminds me how important epicenter design really is...

Fredrik - Here is a post on Django vs. Rails vs Symfony. It's a very good read.

Matthew Anderson said on September 20, 2006

Classic!

Alexander Berglund said on September 20, 2006

Brilliant and indeed a classic :-)

Karl said on September 20, 2006

Very funny. One thing, though: "We often put the technology horse in front of the cart." Isn't the horse supposed to be in front of the cart? Or did you mean to say that we often put the technology cart in front of the horse?

wilson ng said on September 20, 2006

the first question should not be what it looks like. the right question should be - then what does it do?

Jens Meiert said on September 21, 2006

Yeah, that's technology driven... organization driven projects are another classic. Don't miss.

A2D Webdesigner said on September 26, 2006

It pleases me very well. How does one come on such ideas? :)

raymond olavides said on September 29, 2006

Very true as most clients come to have a site developed without even knowing why they want a site or what problem they are trying to solve through their site. Classic? Classic!

Samuel L said on October 04, 2006

Very nice,classic but still up to date!

Ed said on October 15, 2006

@ Raymond:
I think the egg is on the face of the designer here, not the client.

Sorry, comments are closed for this post. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to send them to me directly.