It’s twenty four years to the day since A List Apart published John Allsopp’s seminal treatise A Dao of Web Design. It must be one of the most vital and cited articles ever to be written about web design. In it John quoted the Tao Te Ching as a way of persuading us web designers to be like The Sage and “accept the ebb and flow of things”.

John compared the nature of print with the web:

The fact we can control a paper page is really a limitation of that medium. You can think – we can fix the size of text – or you can think – the size of text is unalterable. You can think – the dimensions of a page can be controlled – or – the dimensions of a page can’t be altered. These are simply facts of the medium.

And they aren’t necessarily good facts, especially for the reader.

We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility.

Those demands for flexibility led – 10 years later – to responsive web design as a best practice, and on to the present concept of fluid design.

However we’re currently battling against another regression. As John himself wrote recently, “having escaped the gravity well of web pages being ’print, only onscreen’, they became ’apps, only in the browser’”.

The better way of doing things will win out. Why? Because more people benefit from the accessible outcomes of fluid design, and it is coupled with a lower design and technical debt, even if the initial effort is higher. Meanwhile plus í§a change, plus c’est la míªme chose, or as the Lao Tse wrote 2,500 years ago “Well established hierarchies are not easily uprooted. So ritual enthrals generation after generation.”