Bring Back Idiomatic Design
https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design
I’m part of the desktop software generation. From Windows 95 to Windows 7, I grew using mostly-offline software on computers operated via mouse and keyboard, well before tablets and smartphones. Recently, I’ve been missing one particular part of that era: its consistency in design. I want to tell you about
As the author identifies, the idioms come from the use of system frameworks that steer you towards idiomatic implementations.
The system UI frameworks are tremendously detailed and handle so many corner cases you'd never think of. They allow you to graduate into being a power user over time.
Windows has Win32, and it was easier to use its controls than rolling your own custom ones. (Shame they left the UI side of win32 to rot)
macOS has AppKit, which enforces a ton. You can't change the height of a native button, for example.
iOS has UIKit, similar deal.
The web has nothing. You gotta roll your own, and it'll be half-baked at best. And since building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.
> The web has nothing. You gotta roll your own, and it'll be half-baked at best. And since building for modern desktop platforms is horrible, the framework-less web is being used there too.
This feels like the root cause to me as well. Or more specifically, the web does have idioms, the problem is that those idioms are still stuck in 1980 and assume the web is a collection of science papers with hyperlinks and the occasional image, data table and submittable form.
This is where the "favourites" list and the ability to select any text on a web pages came from.
Web apps not only have to build an application UI completely from scratch, they also have to do it on top of a document UI that "wants" to do something completely different.
Modern browsers have toned down those idioms and essentially made it "easier to fight them", but didn't remove or improve them.
phil294