Re: Changing the Social Contract of the Web

Coming to this a bit late but I'm new to this board and I'm getting caught
up.

I would claim that the web is caught between two paradigms: shoe horning
the existing web into a small form factor and native apps.

*The existing web *
is a sprawling thread of pages. You'll have lots of tabs/windows open, each
with it's own back history. You 'spread out' as you do your web based thing.

*Native apps*
are a tight contained experience: you *stay* where you're put. Navigation
to other cool functionality is, for the most part, pulled out and left to
the user to manage by trying a different app.

AJAX/HTML5 has upset this balance, bringing native app behaviors into web
pages. This blurs the lines. I feel strongly that trying to have it both
ways is the source of much of our confusion. We all want to 'close the gap'
but also want to keep everything amazing about the messy/sprawl-ish web.

There is no doubt this is cool, but as a product designer I can tell you
that we are quickly creating a linux-ish beast of amazing functionality
with equally amazing complexity. We are creating a product that only we,
the technorati can understand/use. I claim one of subtle reasons why native
apps work so well is that people like the calm than comes from siloed
functionality. We, of course, hate it, but that's, well, kind of my point.

I don't have a solution here: I'm just making a user centered point:
mushing to worlds together appeals only to the experts, it confuses the
majority. If we really want to 'catch up' we have to realize there is more
to this problem than how the DOM is manipulated: it's also about how users
store/organize/launch these pages as well.

Scott