John Allsopp’s classic article in which he looks at the medium of web design through the prism of the Tao Te Ching, and encourages us to embrace the web’s inherent flexibility and fluidity.
It’s time to throw out the rituals of the printed page, and to engage the medium of the web and its own nature.
It’s choc-full of quotable lines, but here are a few of my favourites:
We must “accept the ebb and flow of things.”
Everything I’ve said so far could be summarized as: make pages which are adaptable.
…and…
The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all. The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible.