An incident today reminded me of a story from when I lived back in Miami… I was driving home from school when I passed a crew trimming hedges on the side of the road. On the side of the crew’s truck was a URL for what I imagine was the crew’s web site. Since I don’t recall 1997 being a boom year for the online lawn maintenance market I’m guessing this crew was just eager to show off their newly minted FrontPage™ skills. The URL to their pre-DHTML opus?
http:ww.michaelslawncare.com/
[sic]
Simple mistake I’m sure. After all, we’re only human, right? Computers are totally going to kick-ass some day. You’ll see, in 10 years the Internet will solve all of our problems!
Today a co-worker sent me the URL to the product page for a camera on sale at officedepot.com. My mail program, Entourage ’04, in its quest to be as grandma-friendly as possible, created a hyperlink to the URL from the URL itself. Whatever process rendered the URL into a hyperlink wiped out the &id after ?level=SK, meaning that anyone who clicks on the (now first) URL in the messages is redirected to an error page at officedepot.com.
Where did we go wrong?
I don’t blame this on just one group. It seems that this is a problem across all disciplines in our field. Back-end people write code that generates infinitely complex URL strings while front-end people are try to keep up with the length and representation of these URLs. Meanwhile, I have to use tinyurl.com every time I want to forward a link to my friends.
I grew up with a last name that drew more wrong guesses than an episode of The Price is Right. You’d think that this would lead me to be less critical of phrases as technical web page URLs, but I am. Orwell’s dream came 10 years late. Clarke’s dream is still 10 years off. We’ve now gotten computers to the point where they’re as dumb as humans were 10 years ago. Is this all I should come to expect from 10 years of web ‘innovation’?
