Industry veterans watched in dismay as two decades of advances in user interface technology were readily jettisoned.

For most developers, the perfect user interface remained elusive as they re-tailored their web sites with alarming frequency, only to settle for sites that were visually stimulating but which still failed to replicate the look and feel of modern desktop applications.

Others, who could afford it, decided to build separate stand-alone versions of their applications, and maintained a browser-based interface for the same service in parallel. Although they were able to keep both user constituencies happy, they came under enormous cost pressures to keep the separate efforts synchronized with each other.

Actually, it was the usability of applications, not so much their look, which suffered the most in this transition. Direct manipulation, using drag and drop, for example, quickly disappeared while the user experience was reduced to using script-driven HTML forms as the primary means of human-computer interaction.

HTML has since evolved to address some of its most debilitating limitations when it comes to describing user interfaces. In the the final analysis, however, it is still a text markup language — excellent for what it is really meant to do, but terrible for what it is being forced to do. Together with new media support in the latest browsers, it can be used to create flashy web sites, but it is still not capable of handling the specialized needs of modern user interfaces.

Why bemoan this now? After all, the Web is here to stay. Because, in its Second Coming, the Web will evolve to look and feel very different — and the transition has already begun.

Second Coming of the Web