Totally agree - the web has been both good and bad for the GUI. I think we saw the beginnings of this with Visual Basic.
A lot of original mainframe text front ends and command line interfaces - as unwieldy as they were - were designed for the task at hand. They certainly weren't all well designed, but the intent was there.
With Visual Basic and the whole "everyone can program the front-end" client-server-thang, Joe Accountant was doing the HR front-end, with buttons and menus everywhere doing what-not. Same thing with the web, 'scept the bar has been both lowered and raised at the same time (a lot of 10 year olds are doing a better job than the corporate bumkins.)
Also, everyone's forgotten the keyboard - especially for web apps. The mouse is great for graphical apps, and for new users, but slower again for repeated tasks, especially in corporate apps (intranet or not). Anything worse than being on a major web site and bouncing around the screen because the tab order for controls was ignored? That's GUI 101.
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Totally agree - the web has been both good and bad for the GUI. I think we saw the beginnings of this with Visual Basic.
A lot of original mainframe text front ends and command line interfaces - as unwieldy as they were - were designed for the task at hand. They certainly weren't all well designed, but the intent was there.
With Visual Basic and the whole "everyone can program the front-end" client-server-thang, Joe Accountant was doing the HR front-end, with buttons and menus everywhere doing what-not. Same thing with the web, 'scept the bar has been both lowered and raised at the same time (a lot of 10 year olds are doing a better job than the corporate bumkins.)
Also, everyone's forgotten the keyboard - especially for web apps. The mouse is great for graphical apps, and for new users, but slower again for repeated tasks, especially in corporate apps (intranet or not). Anything worse than being on a major web site and bouncing around the screen because the tab order for controls was ignored? That's GUI 101.