The Next Wave of Format

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•Introduction

•The nature of formats

•How new formats come to be

•The state of creative formats on the web today

•The next wave of format

   Formats for coherence

   Formats for diversity

   Formats for navigation

   Formats for flux

   Formats for ubiquity

   Formats for identifying origins

•Conclusion

The state of creative formats on the web today.

As a young medium, the web has a far sparser, less ingrained set of formats for creative people to fall into. That, more than any other factor, explains the paucity of compelling work online, the indifference that audiences have felt to web media, and the prevailing sense that this medium, though it hasn't yet come into its own, is already tired and cliche-ridden. The medium isn't tired, but it is awash in tired formats. Many of the most innovative new formats have not yet had a chance to stand out from the visual, graphic, and animation noise around them.

The same was true of other media in their infancy, including newspapers, magazines, film, and television. When Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow referred to TV as a "vast wasteland" in 1961, he was referring to a monopolistic medium whose oligopolistic owners had straitjacketed it into a few highly formulaic formats. It's much less of a wasteland today; it is awash in creative and original formats for doing the thing that TV does best: providing the addictive illusion of intimate human contact. The World Wide Web, meanwhile, has become its own kind of "vast wasteland," with some pockets of quality, but with a huge amount of amateur, overblown chaff to wade through and very few sites that live up to the Web's potential.

This, too, is a function of lack of formats. The e-commerce industry faltered in 2000 precisely because of the lack of consistent, inexpensive formats and conventions -- for displaying merchandise, tracking and fulfilling orders, letting the customers know what they had ordered, and identifying the pages called up on cue. Each company felt obliged to invent all this from scratch. Not only was this far more expensive than it should have been, but it instilled an unnecessary ethic of hyper-originality. Young web designers, fearing the label of "shovelware," tried to create their own distinctive site "look and feel" formats. Web entrepreneurs encouraged them, thinking that was the only way to build mindshare. But instead, it turned audiences off; confronted with so many different formats to make sense of, they returned to the familiar brick-and-mortar world, or else to Amazon.com, whose attention to high-quality formats is probably its greatest competitive advantage.

Underneath all this format confusion is a lack of format leadership. Because of its richness, diversity, and anarchy, the web is also a place where it's easy for formats to clash and overwhelm. If there were a set of well-accepted common formats for e-commerce -- the online equivalents of the supermarket shelf and aisle layout -- then the use of e-commerce by actual purchasers, instead of just enervated curiosity-seekers, would be much greater. This is not just because formats attract audiences, but because they make producers and providers far more effective, by limiting the number of creative decisions that need to be made.

To be sure, a variety of new web-site conventions are beginning to emerge, but few of them are mature enough to help fulfill the web's potential for meaningful content or commerce. These formats include the use of frames for tables of contents, the annotated web log ("blog"), the convention of opening offsite links in new windows, the thumbnail photo index and the "printer-friendly" button for long articles. If these formats seem fairly mundane -- the web equivalents of a page number or station break announcement -- it's because the web's formats are only now beginning to evolve beyond the most basic, utilitarian needs. Or as Ted Nelson puts it, "The software world currently corresponds to the Pre-Director stage in movie making (1893-1904). During those years, when short films were already being shown in theaters, the job of making the movie was given to the cameraman -- because he knew how to work the equipment." The type of creative format design that will define the web experience -- in the way that, for instance, the cinematic innovations of D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles defined the medium of film -- is largely still to occur.

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