Introduction

The history of the Web, as portrayed in "Site - Seeing", has gone through stages since it's inception, to become the highly-usable visual wonderland it is today. The web was first introduced by Tim Burners-Lee who wanted an easy way to transfer information from person to person. Once the format was introduced People were excited about the new technology and started creating tables and frames in order to share images and artwork as well as words. However the technology was new and had much to improve on, but first the designers came forth with an era of sites packed with lots of pictures and artwork that slowed down the usability. I remember this era being very prominant when I was first becoming introduced with the inthernet. As in the book, this era can be related to cars. At first, the hype was all about the technology, but like this era with the web, cars saw then bigger motors, radios, air conditioning, chrome, glitter paint, curves and lines and so on. These were expensive add-on's that were almost specifically for flash.The technology hype came when the notion that artwork and images have their place in the web and were somewhat, old news. With the new technology that came about animations were common as well as interactivity within the sites and their design. This however clouded the web with too much "fluff" and slowed the use and confused the users. Therefore the usability era came about. This era sought faster download times, more user friendly interfaces, and possibly, the truth (but that's a different story). These demands resulted in less glamour, in some cases, but allowed for a broader audience and a larger population of interest. The future of the web relies on us, to create the perfect environment for communication with whole world.