Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Do user interface standards stifle creativity?
Jakob Nielsen: Do user interface standards stifle creativity?
Despite the strong consistency in all Mac software do you think Excel looks like MacWrite? Or that there was no design creativity involved in making MORE (a popular outliner)? It's clearly not the case that all GUI software is the same even though most software has pretty strong compliance with the platform design standards these days.
Dave Winer: I absolutely agree. The Mac UI guidelines of the day covered a small part of the functionality of any app. Yet developers resist standardization, I did too.
It depends what form the standardization takes; I believe that one of the greatest parts of the WWW is how not every web page works or looks the same.
That being said, the standard navigation features achieved in iCAB achieved via LINK tags are more the way I would want standard interfaces to go.
P.S. While using iCAB the other day, I noticed that it supports the HTML 4.0 tag Cool!
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