Changefulness

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1853

But our higher instincts are not deceived. We take no pleasure in the building provided for us, resembling that which we take in a new book or a new picture. We may be proud of its size, complacent in its correctness, and happy in its convenience. We may take the same pleasure in its symmetry and workmanship as in a well-ordered room, or a skilful piece of manufacture. And this we suppose to be all the pleasure that architecture was ever intended to give us. The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our minds for a moment.

Yet all this is true, and self-evident; only hidden from us, as many other self-evident things are, by false teaching. Nothing is a great work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture.

Let us then understand at once, that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size.

The page as a map

A medieval book had no page numbers, no index and no search. Its readers found their way by its ornament: the large initial that opened a book, the smaller one at a chapter, the paraph at a paragraph, the filler that closed a short line. Every mark said where you were and how much it mattered.

The same marks can be grown on a web page from the page’s own structure, so that the ornament is the information architecture, not a costume over it. That asks something of the maker that Ruskin asked of the builders of his day.

You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.

A program cannot be a man, but it can refuse to be a cog-wheel: it can let every line it draws keep a little of the hand’s irregularity.

The measure of the page

The scribe’s page was ruled before a word was written. In the books that look most at rest, the text block sits in the page as the page sits in the spread, and the margins grow from the gutter outward.

A web page has no fixed page, but it has a measure, and the measure can be honoured in the same way: the ornament sits in the margins the text leaves.

Rank, not decoration

Ornament that marks everything marks nothing. In the book the ladder was strict: a painted initial opened a book, a penwork initial a chapter, a paraph a paragraph.

Our most invisible typographic convention is an ornament that was never painted.

On the web the ranks are already in the markup: headings, sections, quotations, figures, code, asides, navigation.

Grown from the page

Each frame on this page is measured from its box when the page is laid out, and written again when it changes.

// a frame for every box, grown from its own box
for (const el of boxes(document))
  draw(frameFor(el, measure(el), { rich, seed }));

Nothing here covers or crowds a word. Take the frames away and the page is complete; put them back and it is a place.