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T h e A r t & S c i e n c e o f We b D e s i g n
they are. Think about spell-checking a file in a word processor. How does the computer know which words to flag? Simple pattern matching on the values of the characters it finds in the document. Compare that to the computationally intensive task of, say, recognizing the words in an audio file. You could do it, but it would be a lot harder than just zipping through a text file. Thus, the fact that HTML is derived from plain text means that it inherits all the computer-enabled benefits of ASCII. Computers can manipulate the text. We can create programs to do all sorts of wonderful things to our content: We can index it and search it, we can translate it into other languages, and we can copy and paste it. The possibilities are, quite literally, endless. None of these things are possible when you leave text behind. In traditional print design, for example, it is not uncommon to take text from a layout program like QuarkXPress and drop it into a graphics application like Photoshop. By turning the text into a graphic, designers can manipulate it all they want to achieve the desired effect. They can stretch and rotate and embellish until a headline or drop cap is perfect, and then import it back into their documents. But what if we do this on the Web? The words in the headline, as a graphic, lose their meaning. The computer can no longer distinguish them as words—it sees only a graphic. The machine-readable benefits of text are gone. With a foundation of plain text, HTML takes it a step further into structured text. If machine readability is an admirable goal, then structure applied to simple text is the proverbial Holy Grail. Think about it: If a computer can process a file, adding structure by means of tags can provide clues to what that text actually means. For example, take the following bit of text: The story was about Microsoft and Bill Gates.
Translating the Web with Babelfish It can be tempting to bypass the limitations of HTML for the visually stunning impact of graphics. By imprisoning parts of your pages as graphics, you can achieve a variety of effects beyond the rather rudimentary capabilities of today’s browsers. Headlines can come alive in any typeface you desire. Text can rotate and show off drop shadows, and on and on and on. But is it really such a good idea? For a perfectly clear example of the power of text, we can turn to the Alta Vista Search Engine. One of the interesting features the service offers is the
capability to translate Web pages into other languages. Thus, if you find an interesting looking page written in Spanish (and you don’t happen to habla Español), you can let the Babelfish translator convert it to English. That is, if the page is actually still text. The engine can’t get to the words found in graphics, so all those fancy headlines are going to stay elusive. Bummer, considering that’s often the most important content on the page. And those sites that create their content as a graphic or Flash animation? Well, you’re completely out of luck.
The Alta Vista translation service, Babelfish, will convert Web pages between a number of different languages... if it can read them.