Innovators keep internet on the rails

Wired on Friday:  Does the web have an aesthetic? It's the kind of question that must have been bandied around at philosophical-leaning conferences, like Copenhagen's "Reboot", or perhaps in the sodden bars surrounding the internet's Oscars, the webbies, held in New York last week, writes Danny O'Brien.

These days, though, I think the dominant answer to what makes the Web look the way it does lies not in thoughtful Denmark or in web celebrity opinions, but in a suite of computer programmes called "Ruby on Rails" - ironically written by a Dane who is now a web celebrity himself. And the story of how Ruby on Rails could dominate not just the look, but the future direction and power of a global network goes to show how influential small tools, freely given, can be.

If you look at any of the new suite of websites being blessed with venture capital and rave reviews, you'll spot little features that make them look like they've come from the same factory. Lots of white space, large sans serif fonts, soft tints, text boxes that come alive when you click and type into them - from flickr.com to yelp.com to digg.com, they all share similar designs.

Ruby on Rails is a programme that lets coders create dynamic websites. Helper programmes like these are essential to build a complex site these days, and are used by almost all the slaving employees who build the world's web.

At best, they are like toolboxes, giving coders enough equipment to do their job. At worst, they are crutches - carrying the weight while hasty programmers stagger to a deadline. At their very best, though, they can transform the possibilities of a medium like the internet.

In the early days of the web, the greatest transformer was a computer language called "Perl". Perl let you write programmes designed to eat up text, mess around with it in complex ways, and then spit out more text.

As it happens, that was exactly the kind of tool that the early web - a predominantly written world, which sent and received its information as little blocks of text - needed. Perl grew with the web, and the web grew to match Perl.

When programmers said "Oh, yes, we can certainly do that online", or made suggestions about what would be a "cool and easy" feature to include on a site, those decisions were probably measured out in how many lines of Perl code would need to be written.

Like a plumber gauging the size of task by what he can do with his tools, Perl defined what could be done on the web.

David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails' creator, built his new framework to help build a newer generation of websites. His employer, 37signals, designed targeted websites that did one thing well for clients. The company needed to keep their clients happy with lots of small, incremental and responsive improvements to their sites. But, given their small range, they also need to be maintainable in a minimal amount of time by a small team of coders. As it happens, those constraints are very similar to most web start-ups.

The tool Hansson developed was better at dealing with these organisational challenges than frameworks built in Perl, or its competitor, Java.

Like many essential programmes, and like Perl and the website servers it ran on, Hansson gave Rails away for free. The benefits of handing away the company's crown jewels turned out to be huge, not just for Hansson, but for his employer and the web at large.

Rails turned out to be just as applicable to other coders' challenges as it was to his own company. When he released it to the wider world in July 2004, many web coders fell upon it like manna from heaven.

Hansson (26) became an international celebrity in the world of programmers, and a world expert in the code being used by hundreds of companies.

His company, 37signals, moved from being a design shop to a website production factory, churning out successful one-off websites that could charge subscriptions to their users. The book they wrote on how they used and built Rails made them $120,000 (€95,000) in a month.

But the biggest boon was in a huge explosion of sophisticated websites written or inspired by Rails, quickly responding to their users' requirements, and coded and managed by very small teams.

While it's unlikely that Ruby on Rails will ever drive the majority of the world's websites, it drove a disproportionate amount of the websites that coders (and Silicon Valley venture capitalists) were interested in, and that stimulated its adoption.

This brings me back to the idea of aesthetics. How a website works - the messy details of what happens when you click - are usually seen as being radically different from how it looks.

But that's probably the biggest mistake of the older web. Familiar websites are easier to understand; and a website that hides its functionality behind an impressive front-end may well suffer in obscurity for its beauty.

Rails doesn't define how a website looks. But when coders came to use Hansson's code, they copied not just 37signals' way of doing things, but also the way the company's websites looked.

Some of that look - the large amounts of white space, the large fonts - was inspired by others, but its quick uptake among many other sites, is certainly connected to its free ride on Rails.

Over the last few months, that look has become almost a cliche. And, unlike the high fashion worlds of the webbies, or the theoretical heights of Reboot, cliches on the web are useful. They're the familiar landmarks that make websites comprehensible; such cliches catch on and stay, and they become a dominant aesthetic.

At some point, such a look and feel will become more than a cliche, it will become what everyone assumes a website is supposed to do. And then it will be time for another innovator like Hansson to show that, when it comes to the internet, it's the tools you make, that make the medium.