Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

hindsight, foresight

An intern at work today asked to sit in as I put together a Flash graphic for a project she’s working on. The graphic mainly consisted of adapting a graphic I’d put together two weeks earlier, so I spent a good bit of time trying to explain the various ActionScript functions in the document — this is the preloader, this parses the XML file, this does the shading, etc. But if I were in her position, I don’t know that my attempt at “instruction” would have been all that helpful.

Which, along with a conversation I had with Rob tonight, got me thinking: These new journalists are coming into the field just a few years after we graduated college, yet the field itself has changed so much in that short time.

I started tinkering on the Web at a time when everybody else seemed to be doing the same. I wasn’t a mid-90s early adopter, instead climbing aboard the “build a Web site” train in late 1997 or early 1998, when the Web really started to take off commercially. At that time, the standards for what constituted a “good” Web site were fairly low — just having your own Web presence was kinda cool — and the tools for producing those sites were still fairly rudimentary.

I learned HTML from FrontPage (gah) and Dreamweaver, switching back and forth between design and code views. And I learned Flash on the job, expanding my skillset with every project. However, I learned and tinkered using early versions of these programs, my skills evolving along with the software and expectations for the Web in general. It was okay to be learning and tinkering, because everyone else was trying to figure it out, too.

Looking at the tools I use today, though, I wonder how I would do if I wanted to get into the online world now and have to learn this software from scratch, without the benefit of having grown up with it. The tools I work with have grown amazingly powerful in the past six or seven years. But are they so complex and feature-rich that they’re nigh-impenetrable for novice users?

Flash, for example, is no longer a mere animation tool; it’s a platform for building amazingly complicated applications. And the application is so programmer-centric compared to its earlier incarnations, I wonder if I would find myself too intimidated to really pick it up. And it’s become so established now, there’s a huge learning curve to get to the point where you can produce something that would be considered professionally acceptable.

And while Dreamweaver is a great way to visually lay out and edit a Web page, it’s a tool best used with an informed eye, especially with its more recent incarnations’ tendency to create mangled CSS code on the fly. I’ve actually almost completely stopped using Dreamweaver, going “old school” with the BBEdit text editor. But I approach Dreamweaver now with an awareness of how a Web site and an individual page should be structured and coded, an awareness I cultivated during a time when Dreamweaver wouldn’t try to second-guess or outsmart me. I don’t think a novice would notice Dreamweaver’s sins, much less know how to correct them.