While researching the vocabulary of quests, (from which the most important fact to remember is that the focus of a quest is returning home, not just running an errand), I started to think about the vocabulary of web browsing. It’s such a passive experience, if you take web browsing grammar at face value. Browsers render pages for the user to read, interaction involves a click which issues a ‘request’, by the browser on your behalf, to the server from which another page is fetched and rendered.
HTML, that language of the web, is not a language at all. It is a ‘markup’ specification. CSS, the style of each page, separates ‘content’ from ‘presentation’. Web browsing is a remarkable mundane experience, it would seem. Click, read, scroll, click. No wonder Ajax and then Javascript libraries like Prototype caused such a stir, with their awesome visual effects like the ‘hide’ and the ’show’. Web browsers everywhere crashed at the thought of rendering such cutting edge visuals (at least, mine did).
So, looking a the vocabulary of web browsing didn’t reveal a valuable idea in the same way that the vocabulary of quests did. The vocabulary of browsing is staid and somewhat passive. If the mouse click is analagous to the channel numbers on a remote control, is the internet as passive as television? Why doesn’t my browser react to me? Why is my browser a presentational piece of software and not a user-centric application? Where is the Web 2.0 browser? Where is my level 20 browser?
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