Recently on the net, there has been a discussion of teenage web designers. Some teenagers think that because they know HTML, they can do professional work. Some teenagers know that it takes a lot more than that. Some adults refuse to believe that any teenager could be aware that it takes more than HTML knowledge to be a professional. All in all, it is a fertile ground for misunderstanding.

Even so, there were some interesting ideas and questions that came out of the discussion. Regardless of age, some people come to the web and create wonderful sites almost immediately. Other struggle for years, following many dead-end paths. What makes the difference?

In part, it comes down to experience. Several years ago, I got very serious about writing science fiction, and about getting published. Life intervened, so I never got published--although the signs were there that I was getting close. But along the way, I learned a few things. I learned how to write. I learned how to apply criticism to improving my work, and to look at my own work critically without doing it self-destructively. I also learned the truth of this maxim: In any field, it takes ten years to become an overnight success.

Why ten years? Some skills really do take that long to learn, but many don't. Technical competence is not the criterium of success; it is necessary but not sufficient. The other side of those ten years is almost entirely in the intangibles: experience, discipline, focus, judgment. Each of these is equal in importance to technical mastery.

Technologically, the web hasn't broken any new ground. Hypertext and markup languages have been around for 30 years. HTML actually lacks a lot in these regards. Computer graphics have been around for decades, and yet the widely supported graphic formats for the web are quite primitive. The Macintosh had good sound ten years ago. Java, as an object-oriented language, has roots that go back to the 1970's. Javascript? Scripting languages have been around forever, too. Human interaction? The web is years behind; the technological grandparents of forms and links go back close to 30 years as well.

One of the distinguishing characteristic of the web is access. It's like the desktop publishing revolution of the 80's, which enabled a lot of people to publish without going through publishers. But even then, there were entry barriers in terms of cost; the early laser printers cost around $6,000, and few people had computers that could do the work. Now computers are extremely common, and you can publish on the web for free. Practically anyone can do it.

Another distinguishing characteristic of the web is integration. It doesn't do any one thing particularly well, but it brings together a lot of diverse concepts in a way that creates a very effective presentation medium. The web is neither a text medium nor a graphics medium; it is an integration of these things and more.

A lot of the people who are doing well on the web were able to bring a lot of experience and knowledge with them. Some, like me, already knew how to write. Some had already been using markup languages to create large documents, including cross-referencing and indexing, the paper-document equivalent of linking. Some already knew graphic design. Some already knew how to build interactive interfaces. Some knew how to design for effective human-computer interaction.

Some people come to the web with the ability to integrate disparate ideas and skills into a unified whole. Because the web itself is an integrated medium, this approach to design and development lends itself extraordinarily well to the web. These are the people who can put together a good site, as opposed to putting together a good page.

In short, there are people who have that ten years of experience required to become an overnight success on the web. At least for the present and near future, though, none of those people got their start on the web.

But there's one more area that we still haven't discussed, and that is content. All the technical skill and sharp judgment in the world are useless if you don't understand the material you want to present, or the audience that you are presenting to. The ten-year rule can and often does apply here as well.

Who are the people who do a great job soon after coming to the web? By and large, they are people who have already made it most of the way through that ten-year effort. They know who they are, and they know what it takes to succeed. They know how to transfer experience from one field to another. When they get an assignment to create a web site, the incremental learning effort is relatively small.

In short, the technical part is often the easiest part. Success comes from bringing everything together in a meaningful and useful way.