The page metaphor. It sucks.

The Web browser brought with it a metaphor which has dominated software development for the last 10 years: the page metaphor. I don’t think I need to explain this. Everyone knows what a page is. Ok, the page metaphor doesn't *always* suck. In fact it can be a wonderful thing. The problem of course is that every information and/or programming model is not well suited to the concept of a page.

Of course when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. And when you have a web browser everything looks like a page.

And so, every information presentation model on the planet was refashioned as a web page. In many cases this has been fine. But in many others it is a bit like dressing up a pig in a prom dress. The bottom line is that for many things, the page metaphor really does suck.

What happened was that when the web revolution began, Interface development was taken over by HTML jockeys that had no idea about the dialog that we had been having in the preceding decade about how to make it easy to access and manipulate information. It was as if the preceding decade, which I call the decade of the user interface, never happened.

The primary reason for this disconnect was the fact that the tools we had for developing desktop applications were not available to people who wanted to create web accessible experiences. So everything that you wanted to create had to be refashioned as a page, or it wouldn’t work. This was a horrible thing for the state of the user interface art. But it is what it is, and it was what it was, which is to say unavoidable. People wanted everything to be web accessible and there simply were not tools capable of building on the lessons learned in the decade of the user interface.

And so, we regressed.

Everything became a page, and much of what was learned was lost. We now have a decade of people who really don’t understand the issues faced and the lessons learned in the past. Many of them even look at this history with some disdain, converting their more limited modern experiences into a virtue. They believe that this more constrained universe is just the "new way".

Fast forward to 2008, Ajax, Flex and the Rebirth of User Interface.

It has taken us living through another decade, the decade of the web page, for us to come full circle. With new tools such as AJAX, DHTML, and Flex, we now have the ability, finally, to create applications that look and feel like desktop applications. We can now fully leverage the knowledge and experience that we developed in the decade of the user interface.

For me personally, this is an exciting, though way overdue development. During the decade of the web page I will admit I never learned how to create a good web page. I went straight from desktop apps to Flash and then Flex. I just found the web metaphor far too limiting and constraining. Important though they are, I just couldn’t get into building web pages.

The Internet generation, and the decade of the web page have been critically important social, cultural, and economic drivers. But we have indeed lost something over the last 10 years, and while I am sure we will get it back, it is taking far too long.

And so, what many people, from pundits to civilians, consider to be a new revolution, is really just recovery of lost ground, tip-toeing towards a future of interfaces sucking just a little less.