It’s worth talking about Web Applications. They are the latest greatest grand vision for the Internet Web, and have been for some time now. But they have problems, too.
One of the biggest problems with Web Applications becomes clear if you install a browser add-on that operates just fine on a normal page, but fails on these special, modern “application” pages. For example, SourceForge: Pentadactyl is such an add-on. It lets you use the Mozilla-type browsers using interactions familiar to users of the vi and vim editors (it’s actually a fork of the add-on called Vimperator).
It works pretty well, and I was well on my way to adapting my use to it (ie, relearning browsing using those idioms). Then I tried using it with a few web applications (particularly Google Reader), and had computer collision deja vu. This is a common phenomena for people that use computers enough: you run into the same wall you’ve run into before.
Namely, Web Applications roll their own interactions. And they don’t necessarily do it in a way that matches the platform or browser norms. The result being an uncanny valley in Web Apps, where they look and act close enough to either web pages or regular applications, but are a sufficiently mashed version of both as to offend.
This is especially true when the roll their own widgets, which is unfortunately going to become more common. We have long seen that problem in Flash applications, where authors regularly broke expectations.
It’s not merely a problem with insensitive authors, though. It’s a general problem.
But when you take a step back, it’s not even specific to the web. It’s specific to Human-Computer Interaction.
One of the big gripes about the GNOME desktop is how they limit configurability. You get the same kind of problems with browsers offering different levels of configurability. And, anyone that’s tried to use an Apple Inc. Macintosh computer while using either a computer running Microsoft Inc. Windows OS, a GNU/Linux OS, or other OS knows the pain of switching between radically different keymappings.
The problem comes down to being able to interact with a system in an expected way. A lot of that comes down to being able to configure a system to use what you’re accustomed to. And a lot of the problems come from breaking the expectations of that possibility.
Take, for example, the sites that impose a copy notice into anything you copy from their pages. When you select and copy text, they have a script that appends or prepends some text about where you copied it from. That totally breaks the expectation that what you copied will be verbatim. And they don’t offer any simple way to turn it off, meaning you must resort to either manual removal of the addendum or block loading of the script.
The answer to this problem (disregarding the fact that a company may desire not to give you the power to use its service or device as you please) is abstracting the interaction and configuration so that you can plug in your environmental desire.
It’s a very difficult problem to manage, of course. We have long seen the error of the web in this regard: pages put on so much makeup you’d think they were running for president. The original web was one of serving documents. The original web grew to allow some minimal styling, to allow images. That grew to the web of today, where you can make a webpage that uses WebGL to run a full-on videogame.
It does add to the versatility of the tool, but at a certain point you start feeling like what was a great knife is now one of those Swiss Army demonstration pieces with 100-odd tools. The glory of computing is that you can still eschew the majority of them and stick with a knife without the unwieldiness. But that’s if you’re building the page or site.
It’s trickier to disentangle the sites you visit from their webs of scripts, extraneous content, etc.
Sure, you can write a configuration conversion tool so that your interaction preferences can be synchronized between devices, but it’s harder to get the developers to agree that there’s an abstract set of preferences that two or more applications can feed from without rolling their own.
Ask any gamer that doesn’t like the default bindings and interactions of games, how many times have they inverted the pitch controls? How many times have they remapped their keys? On every single game.
Steam, the Valve game distribution platform, might actually be a prime ground for building a configuration abstraction. You download a game, it asks Steam what your preferences are, and you don’t have to make modifications except where the game has options that are not in the set that Steam provides.
Anyway, at least some areas are seeing progress. Mozilla’s BrowserID project, OpenID, among other open projects attempting to fix one of the most common duplicate configuration systems, the basic service signup requiring a password for every site.
But that’s just one piece of the larger puzzle, which will eventually be recognized.
There’s another side of the coin, of course. Sometimes learning a new system is good. If every piece of software adapts to you, how can you ever learn a better system? That objection’s answer is in the very concept of abstraction. You can simply change your interaction, like you can change your clothes.
And it works better when every piece of technology you touch obeys. If you want to learn the metric temperature system, it’s far easier if every source of temperature data gives you the metric once you check or uncheck a box.