joshclarkson.net

As I write this, I’m in a 737 flying over the Rocky mountains on my way home from a long week in Denver, Colorado. When you think about all the infrastructure that is in place to facilitate a flight from one US city to another it boggles the mind. Not just software and hardware; but people, places, processes, and protocols. With all those puzzle pieces a person and their belongings can be safely (and magically) transported. (I’m hoping :)

All those balls in the air makes me think of the conglomeration of technologies that make up the web services I’ve built and how they are working together to synergistically create an experience and a working model of something much bigger than it’s parts.

Nowadays when a person looks at a website they rarely see a collection of pages but most websites have become their own platform and environment for the user. The advent of Ajax and frameworks like jQuery, have made a consistent look and feel with consistent user controls a must have for any (aspiring) mainstream site.

To extend my (overextended) flying analogy, certain plane manufacturers and boarding methods for example have become the default choice for all airlines. This is generally a good thing. We want our planes to be Boeing and our airports to have rolling sidewalks. (Those are awesome by the way; “Look at me! I’m walking and I’m not moving my legs!”).

However along the way it seems we’ve laid aside some important considerations on the merits of a completely unobtrusive (read “it doesn’t get in my way”), user interface.

Remember standard hyperlinks? Why do away with a method that has worked for years just because you can slap an id an on element and a write up a jQuery function? We need to at least with temerity consider not breaking a time tested model.

Remember documentation that was simple text pages hyperlinked together? An amazing tool still today which many have abandoned.

If you’ve created an exclusive club that requires an up to the minute javascript interpreter, at least bother to preserve the use of the old fashioned back button.

It so easy to ignore all the technologies that, when built upon, gave us our new shiny toys. However it takes much more effort to see the important parts of those base UI features that would be catastrophic (in a “your new app sucks” kind of way) to leave behind.