Tim Bray thinks the Web's the Place for most UI interfaces. At least surely for those targeted by WinForms. His most important argument for the success of the web browser is the simplicity of the building blocks and powerful global features like the back button, the print function and the ability to bookmark pages. This reminds me of my observations about haystack's user interface continuations, which bring some of these simple yet powerful concepts to more traditional UIs (including Tim's third group of content creation UIs, which generally don't fit the browser that well - or ask for extensions like the bitflux editor and mozile). It will be interesting to see what concepts and models RDF/data-model driven UI generation will introduce. Projects like haystack give a glimpse in what platform could eventually replace the web-browser as we know it today and factors similar to those that drove the success of the browser will drive the success of this new browser generation, i.e. new powerful meta concepts like the back button will arise and be almost universally usable.
Dave Winer thinks that then, the platform becomes internet explorer, and thus is vendor controlled, too. I disagree: The most import incompatibilities arise if you want to emulate the richer elements from traditional UIs, which you shouldn't want to in the first place. Other incompatibilities arise in graphical design issues, which I think are less relevant in the context of this discussion, but will remain a nuisance while developing. And an important argument for Web UIs is the extremely easy deployment. In the context of Dave's arguments you could still gain complete independence if you sacrifice this advantage as require the installation of an open and standards based browser.
I wonder what people think about XUL (which is open but not backed by a standards committee) and especially W3C's XForms, which competes strongly with WinForms, but is browser based. Both introduce those richer UI elements.
Posted by seefeld at July 13, 2003 23:55