technology

He massively overstates the consistency back then (selective memory probably), and also consistency is bad actually, when it's used without thought.

There were lots of inconsistent keyboard shortcuts between applications of any complexity. Icons weren't as consistent or obvious as he makes it out to be. Various menu items were sometimes here, sometimes there, and inconsistently named. Is it called "Preferences" or "Options" or "Settings"? Usually it was "Edit > Preferences" but not always. Lots of stuff has no obvious logical place at all in a hierarchical menu structure.

So why is "Preferences" in "Edit" with copy & paste and other document editing functions anyway? Those are not related really. Imagine reading the manual/tutorial of your favourite text editor, and it had a chapter "Basic Editing Functions". It tells you about copy, paste, delete but also somehow about how to set the background color, because, you know, one could argue that setting the background color is editing your preferences and so it should go in the chapter "Basic Editing Functions". But I guess it has to go somewhere so there it is (except when it isn't).

Even stupider is when applications adhered to the "File, Edit, ..." type menu when they weren't even working with files, and there was no document to edit either. Consistency for the sake of consistency, a cargo cult basically.

And don't get me started on the fine motor skills required to navigate these menus. Move the pointer a couple of pixels off the generally pretty small item, a whole tree of submenus might just pop out of existence.

I do like his list of rules/guidelines at the end though.

Consistency of interface is why text-based interaction like Emacs is far superior to modern GUIs. I agree with his opening about text-based interfaces being more intuitive and direct, even if that only means labels instead of icons.

For example, Figma doesn't follow any HTML design idioms because there is no HTML. It's written in web assembly; they are on the cutting edge of implementing desktop-style software in the browser. Of course that breaks the HTML-webpage-as-document model. The browser’s back button, keyboard shortcuts, etc. fall by the wayside while a human-computer interaction paradigm is rebuilt.

This sucks actually. Go ahead and make your website beautiful, but it needs to be machine-intelligible for accessibility (WCAG). A program must be able to parse headings, tables, links, buttons, etc. because not every user is using vision to navigate your website. Even for sighted users, it should be possible for them to interpret the semantic structure of the website in order to render it as they prefer.

This author thinks keyboards are only for power user; that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The keyboard is the original and most basic interface with a computer. Even before there were displays. Not everyone is mouse-brained clicking and scrolling around their computer all day. And again… for accessibility the mouse shall not be assumed.

Gee-whiz websites built from “first principles” inevitably impose a specific human-computer interaction based on the arbitrary, and often accessibility-ignorant, ideas of some 20-year-old tech bros who are not seeing the larger picture and the theoretical reasons for certain paradigms from the early days.

I agree with the author but feel like the problem doesn't really exist. Every productivity program I use has the file menu top bar that was talked about. Credit card input is so homogenous that it can be auto filled on 90% of sites I've visited. UI component libraries are making things homogenous to the point of boredom. Just a strange take to me because I usually hear people complaining that they want to return to the past times of LESS homogenous UI

Don't worry, soon all UIs will be written by LLMs to save money so they will all look the same.