– Where’s your easy-to-use, plug-and-play, ethical alternative to these toxic trillion-dollar products?
– Thanks for asking. We’ve been paying out of pocket for years to work on it. Fancy giving us a few million to speed it up?
– No.
– How about a few thousand so we don’t starve?
– No.
– So, is it ready yet?
@aral
My experience has been that the UI is about as much effort as the code itself, and UX is a black hole for soaking up time and effort since it encompases both clarity of purpose and correctness of code.
We can perhaps generalize the concept of “UI” here to any “I” in general; with “interface” also being a synonym for “standard”. Then this paper’s words metaphorically apply:
To be a viable computer system, one must honor a huge list of large, and often changing, standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CORBA, Unicode, POSIX, NFS, SMB, MIME, POP, IMAP, X, …
A huge amount of work, but if you don’t honor the standards, you’re marginalized.
I estimate that 90-95% of the work in Plan 9 was directly or indirectly to honor externally imposed standards.
At another level, instruction architectures, buses, etc. have the same influence.
With so much externally imposed structure, there’s little slop left for novelty.
Even worse, commercial companies that “own” standards, such as Microsoft and Cisco, deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate competition. Academia is a casualty.
Sometimes, when climbing rocks (or just the monkeybars), you have to just let go of the last thing that’s stabilizing you in order to lunge to the next thing that will stabilize you. And hopefully not plunge to your death.
Perhaps certain “standards”, including but not limited to certain “UI” expectations, have to be similarly let go. One considers the choice of higher-level languages to discontinue goto: support, or the choice of gemini to abandon full support for rendering arbitrary html (said support in the form of web browser requires 40 core-hours merely to compile, making it the domain of the rich and corporate).
I close with a quote: “Ask people what their problem is, but don’t ask them for their proposed solution.” UX constitutes expectations not just on the program but also expectations on the literacy of the user, and in some cases it is easier to plan and execute changes on the user side than the program side.
@category_mirrory I think it's relevant to state that I'm building smalltech noJS web browsers for unusual Human Interface Devices!
HTML is trivial to parse if you don't bother with standards-compliant error correction or the DOM!
That Gemini example is quite relevant to me...
@cjd @aral