The creation of a web site is akin to that of a human being. Well, not in the orthodox sense that you’re wont to. The designer is the sculptor, whereas I, the programmer, am God*.
I’ve never thought of web development this way… until today.
The story
It begins with the sculptor, sculpting the body out of clay. Some sculptors like to begin with a big block of clay, and then slowly mould the body into shape. Some like to make the body parts first, then attach them together, to form the whole body.
In design terms, the former is to lay everything out on a single graphic file, and then cutting it into the parts that will form the design for the web page; the latter is to create the parts of the page, and after that, piecing them together.
Then came God.
God breathed life into the body, and then a human being was created.
In programming terms, this means putting in code and doing whatever necessary to make the web page to be useful, readable, and functional, for example, by changing the design into a blog template, adding a tag board, adding forms, uploading the page onto a web server and so forth.
The problem
A grave problem arises when the sculptor, choosing the second approach to design, doesn’t make good body parts, and even worse, he doesn’t even know how to put them together. Instead, he dumps the huge pile of parts (which, by the way, don’t fit well together—think: a longer right leg, etc.) and prays:
“God, please put them together for me. I want to see a human being at the end of it. By today, 6pm?”
God replies, “I’ll do my best. It’s extremely difficult figuring out how to fit these body parts,” he paused thoughtfully, “I mean, I’m good at giving life. Can’t I just give life?” while putting on a sad face.
But nobody hears him or sees his sad face.
By 6pm, God was tired, so God went home. All God left behind was a malformed human being. God says he’ll continue trying tomorrow.
Deep down inside, God knows perfectly how a human being should look like. But God wonders if he should or wants to start over from the big block of clay.
- Disclaimer: All references to God above are purely fictional and are not meant to blaspheme the God or Gods of any individual.
