I’d like to take a moment, or rather, I’d like you to take a moment to reflect on the gentler, transitory moments of the web. I remember reading somewhere someone talking about the only real moments of our lives being those fleeting segments when we catch ourselves off-guard, suddenly realizing we are in between activities.

The limbo, in between. Like working late, walking to the car, stopping as you put the key in the door and smell the rain on the pavement. And just realizing, for a moment, that you are there. That was the example the author gave.

The same can be said of a 404 error. Amidst the hustle and bustle, the impatient waiting for a page to load, the search and click, we are occasionally graced with a rest period. A grace note. A limbo. A space between the actual content of the web. It forces us, like those occasional off-guard moments in life, to stop and remember that we are here. And it is just as valid a part of the experience as the actual destinations, as the activities themselves.

So let us take a moment of silence for the gentle breeze of a 404.

And while we are gaping happily at the transitory moments of our general web experience, think to the experience of a web page loading, the pieces slowly coming together, nestling into place, until we are presented with the final mise-en-scene. This can be thought of as part of the journey, too. And sometimes, those mid-moments are more desirable than the final product.

Take this for example. A white palette with an ambiguous thread of gentle green script. Once the page was fully built it felt like many others, but at this point, before its function became clear, it was an unintentional art piece. A pretty quiet canvas. Potential incarnate. And this; the unintentional patterns.

The final under-rated moment of the web experience I’d like us to appreciate today is the directory index. Something Zeldman recently found an embarrassment, but something I am always delighted to come upon. It gives us a back door into a website, the path less trodden, and it truly gives us, more than any array of hyperlinks, an opportunity to create our own experience. Forgotten images. Draft designs. Incomplete experiments. The directory index is the web in its raw state, before it has put on its makeup and decided how it is going to act. It is a woman in the morning.

Take a moment now to appreciate these wabi-sabi moments of web-life.

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Okay, back to the bustle.