Daoism is a philosophy, like Buddhism, a way of living, of being in the world, which stems from a text of great antiquity, the Tao Te Ching, whose 81 “chapters” enigmatically sweep across human experience, but with a strong common theme, that of harmony.

For the last couple of years, for better or worse, my life has revolved more than a little around style sheets. I write software, tutorials, and guides for them; I’ve answered too many questions to count about them on newsgroups and via email; I’ve fought for their adoption with The Web Standards Project. And slowly I’ve come to understand web design entirely differently because of them, and to see a strong association between design and the Tao.

What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.

Same old new medium

Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted;
Closely held beliefs are not easily released;
So ritual enthralls generation after generation.

If you've never watched early television programs, it's instructive viewing. Television was at that time often referred to as "radio with pictures," and that's a pretty accurate description. Much of television followed the format of popular radio at that time.

Think too of the first music videos. Essentially the band miming themselves playing a song. Riveting.

When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, "ritual," and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don't make sense.

Controlling web pages

…accepts the ebb and flow of things,
Nurtures them, but does not own them

Spend some time on web design newsgroups or mailing lists, and you'll find some common words and ideas repeated time after time. Beneath questions like "how do I make my pages look the same on every platform" is an underlying question: "how do I control the user's browser?"

Underpinning all this is the belief that designers are controllers. Designers want to override the wishes of users, and the choices that they have made about their viewing experience. Designers are all-knowing, and will not tolerate anything less than a rendering on every browser that is pixel perfect with the rendering on their own machine.

Where does this idea come from? I believe it flows from the medium of print. In print the designer is god. An enormous industry has emerged from WYSIWYG, and many of the web's designers are grounded in the beliefs and practices of that medium. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page.

Why does it matter

.. So softness and tenderness are attributes of life,
And hardness and stiffness, attributes of death.

Perhaps the inability to "control" a page is a limitation, a bug of the web. When we come from the WYSIWYG world, our initial instinct is to think so. But I no longer feel that it is a limitation, I see it as a strength of a new medium.

Let’s look at this through the other end of the microscope. The fact we can control a paper page is really a limitation of that medium. You can think – we can fix the size of text – or you can think – the size of text is unalterable. You can think – the dimensions of a page can be controlled – or – the dimensions of a page can’t be altered. These are simply facts of the medium.

The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn't have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility.

But first, we must "accept the ebb and flow of things."