It was a dark and stormy night on March 31, 2006, when Dietrich Kappe held the crowd spellbound with an exposition of Component GUI’s & Ajax. at the monthly meeting of CHI2.
The title was “Back to the Future”. Dietrich mapped a history of paradigms – in the early nineties, the Browser was like a mars lander – you sent it out, it wandered around on the users desktop & sent back some cryptic messages which senior technologists claimed they had intended and understood. The context was that of pure unmitigated text, and even now, if you browse with a textual browser like lynx, most pages still work just fine, really.
Sites were based in a philosophy often referred to as CRUD: Create, Read, Update, Display. And like all new technologies – recall Gutenberg designing movable type to imitate blackletter script – they tended to imitate existing technologies. In this case the models ranged from Phd theses to early CD-Rom notions of multimedia.
In the last couple of years these models have evolved from document centric content management systems to an interactive single page interface. This is a dramatic shift in developers terms from reading an essentially static table to building a complex model and interacting with it. No longer a low res fanzine, the paradigm is that of an online application.
[This certainly maps to my own experience. The interesting problems in interactive design used to be large content sites; application design was seen as a very separate practice. Increasingly, applications are being designed to be delivered through browsers, which encourages convergence and invention in both areas.]
Dietrich went on to note a short history of User Interface:
_ Command line: mediated usage
_ GUI/WIMP: applications & early adopters
_ Web: sort of dumb reports
_ Rich clients: influenced by GUI/Wimp. The philosophical habits of the development community are pervasive; as people reuse GUI components, people also reuse GUI paradigms, which become a jumping off point for Rich Interaction Conventions. Jakob Neilson would claim this as truth.
Dietrich closed his remarks emphasizing the shift from a browser environment to display technology. The scenario he outlined reminded me of Oracles early notions of distributed computing, with the business rules on the server & the browser referencing them. From a development standpoint, it means a centralized maintenance location and a component UI of reusable widgets. Back to the future it is then, as this does have the ring of object oriented programming.
Full disclosure: As you may have guessed by the context of this review, I work with Dietrich at Pathfinder Associates. And often agree with him.
