I’m beginning to surf the web more and more on my smartphone – its a Treo in case you’re interested. My window to www is only 320 x 320, but the convenience is compelling. However, all that effort into those self-serving, all-singing, all-dancing, flash animations on a lot of home pages is completely wasted on me now. I would normally skip them anyway, but because my Blazer browser doesn’t support flash, I have no choice.

Anyone building web sites ten years ago, really only needed to know about 10 html tags. Bold, italic, break, paragraph, anchor, table, table row, table cell, font face, font size, horizontal rule, and one of the list tags. Ok, maybe blink as well. And, er, that was it. When I look at web page source code now, I know what my father-in-law feels like when I try to show him (repeatedly) how to do a timed recording on his VCR. Very confused.

Problem is, the youth of today are doing more and more of their surfing on their personal devices and this will only increase. Complex flash animations, complex page designs, DHTML and all those things that help win awards and look great on a 1024 x 768 screen, are completely lost. Ironically, the really simple basic html pages look great, because the browser has a simple job parsing out the page elements. Try this exercise if you have a mobile device: You’ve probably surfed your institution’s website, but go to the Wayback Machine and surf the first edition of it there.

The implications of this are significant. In my past life, we made decisions of functionality, design and presentation on the base configuration of the majority of our surfing audience. When the stats show that we have a large proportion of mobile surfers, it’ll be time to crank down the complexity of our sites to this base level, or implement a parallel site to serve them. Hmmm.

Presumably at some point mobile browsers will do a better job of supporting more complex pages, rendering scaled flash animations to the small screen, etc, but more importantly these devices will force us to think more about simplicity and functionality for our content. So, is that good news or bad news for museums? Will we need flash programmers? Will we need more skilled web designers and developers or less skilled?

Take a look at some big-name mobile sites: Amazon or eBay – plain and simple.

Ahhh, them’s were the days…