Technofile: Fog in channel continent isolated

AS FAR as I'm concerned, Microsoft and Netscape can fight their Browser Wars in the courts, they can fight on the Web, but I wish they wouldn't do it inside my computer. When I try to open Internet Explorer files, Netscape Communicator fires itself up and elbows Explorer out of the way. Communicator 4.0 looks more elegant than Explorer 3.0.1, but it's a terrible fusspot which insists on making you take three steps when one would do.

I could trash it, but if you maintain Web pages, it's good practice to check how they look in the major browsers. That's the official explanation. The real reason is that, like most people who use their computers for anything besides typing and games, I like collecting software, and I am gripped by the irrational conviction that computers abhor free disk space. But I also realise that, taking the broad view, Explorer and Netscape are about as different as Coke and Pepsi. Maybe we could do with some more flavours. Sometimes plain vanilla is what you actually want.

Enter I/O/D, a trio of London-based designers, with their bold proclamation that "the browser is dead". In its place they offer a free downloadable program called The Web Stalker, promising "high protein" access to the Web. Wired magazine summed The Web Stalker up as "a Lynx browser crossed with a Venn diagram", referring to an old browser that displays only the text of webpages, and those nests of intersecting circles that represent mathematical sets. The Web Stalker's unique selling point is that it maps Web files, and presents them in diagrammatic form. This will be of interest to other Web designers, rather than to people who are interested in the contents of a site. The interface, blank and austere, may also appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysts, or poker players.

The Web Stalker is principally an art statement, funded by Arts Council money. It illustrates the observation made by Steven Johnson, a founding editor of the webzine Feed, that "an interface avant-garde will probably have to announce itself by deliberately concocting difficult interfaces". Johnson made this remark in a discussion, hosted by Atlantic Monthly's online edition, of his book Interface Culture. He predicts that interface design may come to be seen as "the art form of the next century". For this to happen, he suggests, avant-gardists will have to disrupt the conventions of computer use. Art must be user-hostile, or it will not be.

He has a point about disrupting conventions, though I'm not convinced that the new digital art forms need to recapitulate the history of the modern movement in early 20th-century art. Nor will avant-garde forms necessarily break out of the margins. As Bill Moggridge head of IDEO Product Development observes, metaphors tend to be conservative. Moggridge points out that a modern camera is now more a computer than anything else, yet we still think of it as an optical device. Other pieces of equipment will become "information appliances", but their users will continue to think of them in terms of their original functions, such as playing CDs. As these functions are translated into digital code, they become metaphors. "The metaphor you're going to use is what that appliance drives," says Moggridge, who numbers the first laptop (the Grid Compass, 1980) among his design credits. We will be putting files in folders on our desktops for a long time yet. IN YOUR FACEOur chattering classes may have been diverted over the holiday season by the fact that young Master Straw's name had been posted on the Internet, but the World Wide Web had other things on its mind as well. The day after William Straw's name was published in England, British news programmes led on the story, despite having nothing new to say about it. Meanwhile, over on the Boston Globe's Webedit ion, the lead story was a terrorist massacre of over 400 Algerians. If you need a reality check, try a virtual newspaper. WORLD WIDE WEB FIND LINKS TO ALL THE WEBSITES MENTIONED IN TECHNOFILE ON ITS HOMEPAGES AT: http://www.poptel.org.uk/technofile