Visual Language for the World Wide Web

The purpose of this book is to speculate on the developmental route of a visual computer languages and how computer users comprehend interfaces. What has become apparent is the natural development of visual language for interfaces which now form the World Wide Web. No organisation or individual has decided what it should be, it has merely evolved. Compound icons found on websites in North America or Europe are no different from those that appear on interfaces in Central America or Asia. This is not a haphazard arrangement – many factors have enabled this to happen since modernism at the beginning of the 20th century, or indeed 6,000 years earlier with pre-cuniform Sumerian. These influences outside of interfaces, and the transactional nature of using computers has created a visual language through context, contact and a shared code. The context describes the reason for the interaction which is normally transactional between humans and computer interfaces; contact is how the interaction is performed (point/click) and code is the agreed method of communication during interaction (text, compound icon and its lexicon).This book does not measure or factor probabilities of language development – it analyses different visual writings systems to compare their use and possible implication for interfaces. This is undertaken in two main ways. First, by undertaking a small-scale investigation of Maya hieroglyphics to learn from the past and see how this informs computer interfaces; and secondly the first half of this century is looked at and its implication for computer interfaces of the second half of this century studied.

Keywords: Visual, World Wide Web, Internter