Dreams 243.06260 and 243.06540 (page 58) were created by software artist scott Draves through an evolutionary algorithm running on a
worldwide cyborg mind consisting of 60,000 computers and people; scottDraves.com.
implementation within Internet Explorer made it virtually impossible for
Web developers to create content that
would play consistently across multiple browsers.
Note that this period also saw significant movement away from Tim
Berners-Lee’s original vision of the
Web. Web authors had started down
the slippery slope of authoring for
the dominant browser, thereby losing sight of the Web contract that had
carefully arranged for Web content to
be independent of the software that
consumed it.
This breach might have seemed
insignificant at the time, at least with
respect to deploying Web content. The
network effect that led to exponential growth in Web content during the
1990s meant that the Web had already
taken off and that the slowdown in the
network effect resulting from content
coming to depend on a particular class
54 CommunICatIons of the aCm | feBRuaRY 2009 | vol. 52 | No. 2
of Web browsers did not immediately
hamper growth. But the increasing
interdependency between creator and
consumer was not without cost; despite high hopes, the first round of the
mobile Web fizzled in early 2000 partly
because it was impossible to support
mainstream Web content authored
for a desktop browser on small devices
like cellphones and PDAs. The problems that resulted from Web authors
coding to a particular browser involved
iMage by scott draves