On 11/17/05, Patrick H. Lauke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Linking back to my philosophical question at the beginning: is web > development a subset of software development, or is it - for lack of a > better term - the development of an "experience". A related point from > that: should web applications (functional, intranet-type apps) still > have their own "feel" or integrate seamlessly (from a visual standpoint) > with the OS?
I think part of the problem here is that, despite any wishes we might have to the contrary, web browsers don't consistently "integrate" with the look and feel of the OS. Internet Explorer uses Windows' form controls, yes, and Safari uses the Mac OS' controls, but (for example) Gecko-based browsers have their own set which, while reminiscent of older versions of Windows, really isn't native to anything. And despite much progress on the OS-integration front, Firefox still doesn't really feel like a "native" application on any platform. Opera occasionally has the same problem; here on Linux, even though it uses the Qt toolkit (or did last time I checked), it doesn't use the default Qt widgets for form controls. And even if there were perfect consistency of browser form widgets with OS widgets, we would still be stuck with a fundamental problem: web applications, by definition, run in web pages, and no OS in widespread use has an application paradigm which matches that of web pages. So despite consistency of the widgets used for certain parts of web applications with widgets used in certain parts of "traditional" applications, we would still be working in a fundamentally different medium. And I think that web users, on the whole, have come to understand and expect that things on the web "work differently" from the other applications they use, so striving to be "as much like the OS as possible" would be a futile and counterproductive task. Which, I guess, leads us to the latter of your two options; as I see it, a web application ought to have a simple, intuitable interface (or "experience") which is consistent within that application, because ultimately that is all the "control" the web application's designer will ever have. This does not mean that conflicts with widespread OS interface conventions should not be avoided when possible, but it does mean that consistency with the OS interface should not be valued more highly than consistency, simplicity or intuitability within the web application. -- "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
