From an interview with Tim Bray:
When the web came along people shrieked with glee and universally abandoned all those rich immersive responsive pre-internet applications and ran into the arms of the web.
I can remember like yesterday content management conference that was held sometimes in the middle late nineties and it was a woman from a large manufacturing company talking about the content management for the technical documentation, which was a pretty big project, and she said, “Oh it was so great when the vendors all brought in the web interfaces because it forced them to get rid of all these weird cascading menus and options that nobody ever used, and brutally simplified everything down.”
At the end of the day the interface the browser presents is something that people are comfortable with. Over the years since then I have regularly and steadily heard them saying: “We need something that is more immersive, more responsive, more interactive.”
Every time without exception that somebody said that to me, they have either been a developer or a vendor who wants to sell the technology that is immersive or responsive, or something like that. I have not once in all those years heard an ordinary user say, “Oh, I wish we go back to before the days of the web when every application was different and idiosyncratic…”
On the other hand richness is a good thing but I would rather take an old fashioned point of view and if you look at the world’s most popular actual real Internet applications you’ll see things like Google and Facebook and Wikipedia, and so on kind of which I play all day web applications, and they are rich all right, they are rich because they expose you to lots of deep high quality content and allow you to communicate with interesting people and I think a dollar with that kind of richness is worth a thousand dollars of things that wiggle when you put the mouse over them.
Interactivity is important but you know what else is really important? The back button. Ordinary people who have to use computers to get their daily jobs done, are sitting there in the web browser they really like the back button because applications are confusing, nobody has ever done an application that isn’t confusing some times and when you are confused you say “I will just get back out of here”. Anything that discards the function of the back button is a step backwards.
Bray’s approach is to study the web as interface, and not as a programming technology as most do, because what made it powerful was that instead of creating programs to manipulate documents, it created documents with the minimal features of programs: navigation, text highlighting, linking and indexing.
And then all of a sudden twelve fifteen years ago, there was this platform burst out to the sea that scaled to billions of users and millions of servers, was radically heterogeneous and it didn’t matter whether you were a Mac Linux box talking to an IBM box, you couldn’t even tell most times, it just worked. And that was the web of course. ^
Much like Windows XP finally tamed the desktop by standardizing it, the web standardized information.
Since then, as Bray hints, we’ve been walking backward toward proprietary and inconsistent interfaces that substitute bells and whistles for quality of navigation. The web is about information.
People don’t want to “do web,” they want to use the web to find what they need. That may be research; it may be a simple interface like online banking or passport applications; there’s other stuff, but that falls under the category of weird social stuff that probably attracts only a small segment of the population, and generally not those who serve important roles because those don’t have the time to dicker around with the web all day.
For all the rollouts of high-tech websites I have seen lately, few are beating a basic Blogspot or WordPress installation because interactivity is not what brings people back to a website; information or function (online banking, etc) does. If you have the function, you don’t need the interactivity, which is why as Bray points out, many of the most successful websites are coming to us with 1997 technologies.