August 05, 2005 | U And I And Every Program We Use

Call it the Ipodization of the Internet.

Whether you notice it or not, websites are growing handles. They are starting to feel useful, less like something you have to figure out how to use, than something you intuitively know how to use.

Much of this has to do with a web programming technique called AJAX.

Microsoft is getting in on the web action (check their beta search portal Start.com), but say the coolest user interfaces are going to found not on the Interweb, but on desktops running Microsoft Vista.

Either way, as today's Wired News story shows, the remodeling of the internet is clearly underway.

Unfortunately, not everything gets to fit in.

For example:

Rael Dornfest's worries that web designers and programmers would take the new power of AJAX to create showy messes reminiscent of the worst Flash websites, and

Jesse James Garrett's musings on the yet-to-be resolved problem of relying on online applications in a world where laptops move in and out of connectivity, and

Microsoft's Forest Key's belief that Vista will help solve the UI-lost-in-translation-between-conception-and-code problem, since designers get to scratch out their dream designs in a way that produces XML code that web programmers can incorporate wholesale.

And some quotes ended up on the editing floor, too.

Here's two little sections I was sad to lose:

"With an AJAX application, users actually can manipulate data without clicking through to a new page.

This is going to go a long way towards eliminating the user interface insults and injuries we have suffered since we moved to the web," Dornfest said. "When we first went to the web, a lot of us expected it to be more interactive and it turned out not to be so. Now people these days expect it to be flat so they might be a little surprised [by AJAX applications], but the rest of us see AJAX and say 'Ahh, this is what it is supposed to be like.'"

"A lot of customers won't notice the changes but they will notice they no longer feel stupid," Dornfest said.

and

"With AJAX, you are starting to get to where people come to pages with non-drag-and-droppable lists, start tying to drag-and-drop and are surprised that it doesn't work. So, in that sense, everyone is going to have to modernize very quickly."

Dornfest sees the future of user faces not in Microsoft's Vista, but in the shine of an old Apple product.

"AJAX hearkens back to the old Macintosh philosophy that everything should be guessable," Dornfest said. "If you think something should work a certain way, it should most of the time."

I also didn't mention Macromedia's Flash. It's not likely to disappear from the web anytime soon, and I imagine the best programmers will be integrating Flash into sites when appropriate (handling video, for one).

But that's the way the editor's pen scratches (and mostly/sometimes for the better).

And with or without my cutesy line and miles of Dornfest quotes, you still know by the end of the story that the UI's, they are a'changing.

Posted by Ryan Singel at August 5, 2005 12:27 PM

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