NCSDO

Anatomical Insite

At social gatherings, when people ask me about my educational background (a ceramics major at an art school) and what I do for a living (a coding specialist in the IT field for the past 10 years), I often see confusion in their reactions. They sense a disconnect—as if they're watching oil and water do the tango on a hot Miami night. I don't often attempt to explain—at parties, anyway—but the two aren't as separate as they seem.

At RISD, one of the most important aspects of drawing class was anatomy: the human figure as a complex interplay of skeleton, muscle, and skin. In ceramics, we learned how structural balance is an important component of beauty. Aesthetic attributes depend on what lies beneath.

Likewise with websites. As a web developer, I find myself looking at sites anatomically—each part contributing its function to the workings of the whole. An analogy might go something like this:

THE SKELETON
Information architecture forms the structure of a site. The assemblage of pages, and the hierarchy and connections among them, determines the site's size, complexity, and organization. No matter where you are in a site, the skeleton holds its form; it retains its integrity from every angle.

THE MUSCLE
Client-side languages, such as JavaScript, allow for movement and action. When a fresh window appears or when you intentionally move to a new page, what you see is a change in the position of elements on your screen—enabled by these languages the way muscles make our own actions possible.

THE SKIN
HTML—hypertext markup language—controls much of the external appearance of each page. Just as the skin fits the contours of the body, web developers use HTML to arrange the elements of a page to fit the page's available space. HTML governs form and determines basic surface organization.

THE PERSONALITY
Okay, so we have a face: bone layered with muscle covered with skin. It's expressionless without personality—which is where CSS (cascading style sheets) comes in. CSS is composed of everything that gives a site personality and style: from fonts and colors to photographs and illustrations.

CONSCIOUSNESS
You thought I'd stop with anatomy? Server-side languages, such as PHP, are responsible for backstage operations. They process the inputs the body receives. If you enter your username, password, and credit card number on a website, a server-side language evaluates it and determines if the data is acceptable—even before you click "Submit."

MEMORY
Last—but not least—there's the database. It's where all the data is stored, and it's what needs to be updated as conditions change. A website without access to a functioning database is like . . . well . . . a web developer who forgets everything he learned in art school—or who doesn't apply it to his field of choice.

Posted by Jiho Sohn on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:56:32 -0400   |    Permalink