I Have Seen The Future

It may take a few years but I have been to the mountain top and see no reason to change my oft-stated viewpoint that The Future Is Going To Be A Great Place To Live.

In 1993, I worked on my first Web page from the front-page portal of my GEnie RoundTable. It was awkward, but familiar. I had worked with SGML some in the middle 1980s and many of the tags were familiar. But the state of the browser art, in those long ago, pre-Netscape days, was pretty dismal. Everyone who saw the Web saw it in sixteen colors of text characters. Only. No images. No fonts. Just text on the screen, text from all over the world.

In 1995 I got a call from Microsoft. They wanted to know if I was interested in working on their new online network, hosting their aviation forum. I hung up the phone and drove to OfficeMax to buy my first Windows PC, a Compaq, and await my FedEx delivery of the new Windows 95 software.

In 1996, the mother ship called us all home and I traveled to Seattle for a convention of hundreds of forum managers. There, as in most conventions of this sort, the real action took place in the hallways and at the after- parties. I heard then that one day we would see machine-made Web pages that were "just as good" as anything we were building then. This today would be seen as damning with faint praise. But it was enough to send a shiver down my spine. What would I do for a living, on the day after that day?

In the intervening decade and a half, we have made progress toward the machine-made page, if that's how you wish to see it. But I still think we will see agencies building one-off sites for small businesses and individuals doing their own pages for years to come. I don't know that I will retire from teaching HTML when I retire, but I suspect the odds are pretty good that I'll still be retiring from some form of building Web pages.

The latest threat, if you are so inclined, comes from Drupal. Drupal is an open sourced Content Management System. Think of Lego® blocks and you won't be far wrong. Drupal calls them Nodes, and you build little systems, one block at a time, using other nodes already out there or constructing your own. Using this technique, you can quickly model the behavior of, say, an online appointment calendar, or a little weather gizmo that gets the temperature and forecast for a given ZIP-code.

We've started a pilot program using Drupal. It's good. It's been up and running for less than a year, but we can already cruise through an entire Dreamweaver-built site and convert it easily into a more Drupal-friendly format. Point-point, click-click and you can edit your pages without sending Large Checks to Adobe or to Microsoft or to anyone, really. It's a very compelling case, especially for colleges and departments with tiny budgets, which is to say, all of us, now.

Drupal is out there, being tended-to by hundreds of developers the world over. Currently in Version 6 release, we are aiming for Drupal 7 deployment. Those developers are still going to be busy, and there will probably be a Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 some day. We can decide that we are interested in upgrading or we can decide that we like what we have, when the time comes. We need only respond to the needs of the campus Web developer community, not the needs of Adobe shareholders.

There are lots of advantages Drupal affords us over the current Dreamweaver model. Not least of which is that you can edit Web pages from anywhere you can send G-Mail from, with just a Web browser and an internet connection. We can include features as they become ready, not according to some arbitrary release schedule. One day we may schedule content changes and content expirations.

But, someone will still have to provide that content. Drupal isn't a Web page editor, it's a Content Management System, and someone will still need to provide the content that needs managing. And as beautiful and elegant as it appears today, like an exotic Italian sports car, it's going to break. And on that day, they are going to need someone who knows a little HTML….