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9. Breaking All the Rules: <hr> and the Aesthetics of Online Space
- University of Minnesota Press
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Largely forgotten by Web authors and readers today, the horizontal rule, , creates a horizontal line across a page. duplicates the function of rules in print, which create boundaries between blocks of text. Eventually, was duplicated in function by more ornamental rules, images added to a page in place of the horizontal rule. These images may have blinked, resembled ornate script, reproduced flowers arranged as borders, or displayed animals and other animated figures. Because users of early free hosting sites such as Tripod and Geocities often created single pages,rather than multipage sites,the ornate horizontal breaks were meant to divide content over a large vertical space. Contemporary Web practices have since made such rules unfashionable; Web sites that offer galleries of flashy, animated rules are a curiosity today. Overall, the questions raised by revolve around boundaries of all kinds: print/Web, image/text, form/content, semantic/presentational, amateur/ professional. demonstrates the writerly need to pose a boundary at some place on a given page,whether to divide content or to draw attention to the different media used within one specific Web space. That is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. jacques derrida, of grammatology In 1997, David Siegel declared war on the horizontal rule (), a popular HTML tag used to create horizontal lines across Web pages. Siegel, a self-styled provocateur and graphic designer, had published successive editions of his popularWeb-design guide, Creating KillerWebsites, in 1996 and 1997. In that book, he heralded the rise of “third-generation site design,” which purported to do away with the text-, icon-, and menudriven layouts of the early to mid-1990s. The tag was among the • 1 2 5 B R E A K I N G A L L T H E R U L E S and the Aesthetics of Online Space Matthew K. Gold 9 first design elements he wished to discard; Siegel argued that the creators of early Web pages had overused horizontal rules to such an extent that the Web had become “littered” with “visual junk” (69). What had initially been pristine virtual space, he suggested, had devolved into a trash heap of superfluous pixels. Siegel called on future designers to “Banish Horizontal Rules!” (69); nothing less than a complete eradication of the tag would do. Why did early Web designers use horizontal rules so frequently? And, given the near omnipresence of horizontal rules on the early Web, why have those rules received such scant attention in the years since? The general absence of commentary on the horizontal rule reflects a more general void in Web design history (a field of scholarship that is, admittedly, in its infancy). First- and second-generation Web sites tend to be viewed as aesthetic embarrassments, as evidence of how poor sites looked before graphic designers wrested control of the Web from programmers and technicians. As David Siegel noted, for instance, most early Web sites had all the allure of “slide presentations shown on a cement wall” (27). And the horizontal rule, the most banal design element of the most basic early Web pages, has come to embody all that is passé about early Web design. The urge to bury the primitive designs of the early Web, or to ascribe their now-unfashionable aesthetics to the scientific and technical backgrounds of earlyWeb site creators, has fostered narratives that sometimes contain a teleological trajectory, a kind of graphical determinism. In his seminal text Writing Space, for instance, Jay David Bolter charts a move from the original version of HTML, which gave designers little control over the layout of their pages, toward more recent efforts by graphic designers to manipulate not just the vertical, but also the horizontal visual axis of the page. “As a result,” Bolter writes, “some of the most compelling Web pages began to look like magazine advertisements, with striking visual metaphors, display fonts, drop-shadowed texts” and other adornments (69). Although Bolter situates that narrative within a larger story about remediation and a smaller one about the professionalization of graphic design in the context of late capitalism, the “breakout of the visual” (47) that he describes positions earlyWeb design as the rude ground from which more mature Web sites flowered. Returning to the aesthetic scene of the earlyWeb, however, can help us rethink the development of the medium itself, particularly in relationship to evolving notions of space...