[Sigia-l] The future of WWW...

[Dave]

"Usability experts often claim that "different" user experiences are
confusing. The Web proves that different designs aren't necessarily
confusing ­ bad designs are confusing."

Interesting quote. The part that starts ... "The web proves..."
Huh? The web is a usability mess and one of the reasons is the lack of
sustainable conventions and still this is why Flash built in their own
standard component, so that core interaction patterns derive from
learnable conventions instead of a hob-goblin of differences. When
building web-applications the #1 problem is that users don't know how
to do things that are web-based b/c the expectation is that of their
primary OS system and 90% of them are Windows users and in an
Enterprise environment more than that.

Personally, I think that the web and the PC (all the OSes) are a big
mess, but that is a larger issue. But to say that the web proves
anything about usability just seems to be giving in to the notion that
the web is a great success for humanity in every way and is infalable
and should be granted saint-hood.

While both Flash and XAML derive certain efficiencies by using the
embedded components of the rendering engine (I mean HTML does this
too), you do not have to use these standard components. In fact it is
easy not to use them and build or customize your own. From a usability
perspective I'm not sure there is an argument here, except that more
people can use Flash than XAML. But that is not an HCI question, that
is a question of economy.

-- dave