Design history wouldn’t be able to teach us much if it weren’t for the enduring artifacts that compose it. The ability of a cultural artifact to persist and inform our collective consciousness defines a desirable quality of design: permanence.

Tangible artifacts have always suffered from preciousness – a poster or a book may succumb to a fire, garbage bin, or some other determinant of entropy. There is a very finite amount of books that are older than 500 years old. And to this, we limit access to them while dedicated professionals turn their pages in temperature-controlled environments.

The information space is young and quickly evolving, often times making it easy to think of published content as disposable. Sites update by the minute and yesterday’s topics are consigned to the category of the past. While we might not think about a news topic days afterwards, we still might stumble upon it years after it was published by means of a search engine or some obscure link.

Similar to natural disasters, technology and business disasters make a “404 – Page Not Found” error a common occurrence. It is easy to dismiss those lost digital bits that compose our work as forever-gone when the switches get flipped to 0. We create, we publish and a couple of years down the line our creations are supplanted by a redesign or a new website altogether. In this context, it’s difficult to think of our work as having relevance beyond a few years and, consequently, makes it more difficult to approach it as such. But it does. It’s fascinating to think that Google, effectively, has a copy of the internet (remember those Google Cache links?), and it’s not the only one (see any other search engine with a significant index). The most impressive and altruistic of web archival efforts, a project like archive.org, makes the notion of online content permanence a very explicit reality.

Just as tangible artifacts, like books, are subject to entropy, so is digital information. And while it’s difficult to imagine what a document looks like 200 years down the line, I have some thoughts on how to achieve that and the implicit benefits those choices entail.

For some reason my vision of 200 years into the future involves a bespectacled, bearded man in a safari outfit, in the desert, dusting off pages of source code belonging to someone by the name of Ephram Zerb. Back in his laboratory, he pieces together the astonishingly semantic markup and uses a tool to translate it into a visual representation. Either way, the content and design is well-preserved and highly intelligible. In that same trip, a cryptic, corrupt binary is found – unbeknownst to the information archaeologist, it’s the work of the illustrious design firm, Pentagram, encoded in Flash 8 format – it goes in the junk pile.

One of my motives for publishing this was to frame web design from a long-term perspective and to shed some unproductive discourse. Search engine optimization rhetoric is the source of that ‘unproductive discourse’, which I don’t think should inform the temperament of a web designer; rather, it should be understood as an inevitable feature of a work that tends to the craft of web design.

The only rule of search engine optimization

I started thinking about design permanence about the time I was trying to find an approach to search engine optimization. I was frustrated by the lack of a unified body of knowledge, the mounds of misinformation published on the web, and paid ‘professionals’ that dispensed tremendously poor advice like stuffing the title attribute with irrelevant keywords. This, by the way, is tantamount to a modern-day doctor recommending you have some soda-pop for your belly-ache.

I was tired of thinking about published content through the narrowing prism of optimization – prose became a collection of keywords while other elements, like an image’s alt attribute, were bent against their physical will. I came to realize that any worthwhile (read effective) advice was simply a reiteration of rules already defined by some standards body or perpetuated by a professional culture. I began to dismiss or re-interpret any advice where optimization was an end in itself, and reframing it from the perspective of permanence.

Interpolation on the features of permanence and how craft is a requisite component

From my non-academic perspective, permanence has two dimensions: physical longevity and cultural longevity. These concepts are closely related and often times go hand-in-hand.

Physical longevity deals with the lifespan of the work – from creation to dust – where technology plays a central role in the preservation. Looking at the process by which quality books and prints are fabricated, the type of ink (non-fading) and type of paper (acid-free) play to our desire to have something persist.

On the web, I believe a standards-aware practice best-approaches physical longevity. I like to think of the digital medium as being defined by a process of translation. Before a web page gets rendered in a browser, the browser must interpret the 0’s and 1’s that compose the images, consider the HTML markup that hugs the text, and than transform those elements by reading through the rules defined with CSS. To do any one of those tasks, there needs to be an agreed-upon key that makes the translation possible. Web standards are that key, and the transparency, ubiquity and historical legacy of those standards help perpetuate countless copies of that key in the form of browsers and other symbiotic technologies (parsers, crawlers, etc.). Compared to the alternative, there’s tremendous cultural collateral and implicit future-proofing when designing with web standards.

Cultural longevity is different, and is largely the heart of this argument. It deals with the artifacts found in textbooks and design annuals. They are works that the design community has found to be important and worthy of recognition. While the rationale can vary greatly, they are usually a product not only of great design, but almost always a result of immaculate craft. To design a beautiful alphabet is one piece of the puzzle, but to transfer that design into digital form, by means of software, with different weights, sizes and proper kerning requires craft.

Craft can be seen as a function of tradition, skill and practice – it’s the baked-in history and best practices of a profession that provides that professional sheen.

Stating the obvious

There’s a striking similarity between what’s considered search engine optimization and good web production (craft). And in just about every case, the best practice always predates and informs the ‘SEO technique’. When Tim Berners-Lee defined best practices for URLs in 1998, he notably approaches the problem with a longitudinal perspective:

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.

Going through his recommendations, you’ll notice that a lot of them mirror modern SEO suggestions.

Take another example: you do not add the alt attribute to an image to increase “keyword density”, you add it because the image might require context for those that cannot see it. Once again, a common recommendation is already described in a documented best-practice. This isn’t news.

My point is that a web designer shouldn’t be burdened by the muddy, low-level(-of-abstraction) recommendations of search engine optimization – a place where I’ve been myself. Instead, a broader, more abstract perspective that focuses on creating a permanent artifact will address the very same problems with much more elegance and clarity.

If you feel some parts of this aren’t clear enough, would like more elaboration or would like to add your own voice to the topic, feel free to partake in the editorial process by adding your comment.