My Web-Application GUI Nightmare
(c) 2005 - Gerald Zincke

Yesterday night I awake sweating and scared. It was a real nightmare. 

In my dream I sat at my PC in the office and looked for the link to the bug tracking system in our intranet. I opened the web browser and was startled. What was that?

A 48 point large Arial font text was flashing in red letters on green background “Welcome to our new Intranet !!” . With two exclamation marks. And very small below “loading, please wait...”. “Hey folks”, I said to myself, “all I want is that link to the new bug tracking system. I do not want to wait for a new intranet homepage”. 

Finally the new intranet homepage opened. It looked really cool with its dark grey letters on light grey background. I looked for that box “useful links” where I expected to find the link to the bug tracking system. But the box had gone. Instead a life stock exchange ticker was blinking there, telling me the price of my company shares’ every second. If I had any, I sighed, thinking about how much money I could have made if I had bought some shares 1988. But then I remembered that I was there, because I looked for that link to our bug tracking system. Could it be that they really banned all these useful links from the intranet homepage? Were there links at all? No blue underlined text, only dark grey on light grey.

I moved my mouse around without any clue and then discovered, that some small pop up windows appeared and vanished when the tip of the mouse pointer was over something what seemed to be bullet points. One of this bullet points was named “solutions”. I moved there. A popup opened. There I found “development solutions”. This sounded promising. So I tried to move the mouse pointer to its bullet point. This was not so easy for two reasons. First I must admit that it had not been yesterday that I cleaned the ball of my mouse and second: have you ever tried to catch a 3 by 3 pixel circle on a screen with 1280 by 1024 on a 17 inch monitor. Have you? Then you now what I am talking about. 

Unfortunately my mouse pointer missed “development solutions” by two and a half pixels and touched “financial results”. Suddenly the whole screen became black and a red text said, “Loading, please wait!” No I did not want to wait, lets go back and try again. “Welcome to our new Intranet!!” it flashed 48 points large in red on green that my eyes hurt. Now at least I knew what to expect and I decided to get a cup of coffee. When I returned, everything was grey in grey again. Now I knew what to do. I minimized the browser ant set the screen resolution to 800 by 600. This would enlarge the pixels and the bullet points would be easier to hit. With that smart trick – yes it really pays if you study informatics at the university – I managed to select the correct bullet points and in no time I had opened our bug tracking system. 

Not really to be correctly. It asked me for my name and the password of course. As a manager you know, I am not a regular user of our bug tracking system. My people use it heavily, but I use it only occasionally to see, if everything goes on fine or not. So that password. What was the password? Couldn’t that bug tracking system know, who I am? Hey you silly system! 5 minutes ago I was offered confidential financial numbers, just by accident, but you don’t let me know if bug 53211 was solved yesterday or not? Finally I remembered the password again, clicked on that green text “Enter” and really I was admitted to the bug tracking system. 

This thing again had a very different user interface. At least I had worked with it before. Moving the mouse around did not do anything in this system. I knew I had to enter the bug number 53211 into that entry field. But where had the entry field gone? “No, not again!”, I screamed, expecting another user-interface “improvement”. But then I remembered that I had changed the screen resolution. So I minimized the browser window, right-clicked on the desktop and set the resolution back to my familiar 1280 by 1024. I restored the browser and now was happy to see the entry field. After I entered there 53211, I new I had to hit the enter key, that would open a page where I could see the details and the status of that bug.

Suddenly, just one fingertip away from the enter key, I stopped typing. A big question mark appeared in my mind’s eye. Why? Why wasn’t there a button like “find” or “OK”? Why was the user interface of this web application so different to the intranet? Why are all web applications’ user interfaces so different? Why aren’t they similar to what we are used to for years? Why not like Windows? Or similar to the Mac? Is it really an advantage that every developer does it so cool (and differently) that every web page is a new thrilling experience? That web applications look more like movies than computer programs? Who really likes that? What happened to that idea that GUI standards should allow us to work with any application? In the sense, if you know one, you know them all.

My head was spinning with all that questions. Where have we gone in all these years with our Gigabyte, Gigahertz machines? My thoughts went back to the time when IBM had OS/2 with its Presentation Manager user interface. As early as 1987 announced a standard called CUA – common user access. CUA was a standard that told us, how to create a good graphical user interface. Not that Presentation Manager followed the standard completely, but at least it tried and some time later Microsoft showed with its Windows 3.0 how to do it.

At these good old days everyone knew: a grey rectangle on white background is a pushbutton. If I click there, something happens – an action. The action applies to the object currently visible in the window. Object action. And there was a menu. The menu was always on top of a window (not left, or right or scattered around somewhere as it is nowadays). There on the menu also actions could be selected. Buttons and menus. These were the areas where one could click. People learned that quickly. And they bought some OS/2 Presentation Managers and many many PC’s with Windows on it. It was obvious that the GUI was easier to use than the old 80 x 24 text displays. There were even scientific studies (sponsored by Microsoft) that we could use to persuade our boss to buy more GUI PC’s. Good old times. Everyone was happy.

But then something weird must have happened. Why did all the world forget, that it was a good idea to standardize the way how a user-interface is expected to work? Who had the idea that it is a good thing to let people guess where they could click and what that click would do then? What happened to that word “common” in CUA/common user access? Did people forget all the benefits of a standardized user interface? Could it be that I am the only one who knows? All the others brainwashed by a dark power coming from the outer space of our galaxy? 

Oh no!

With this idea I waked up. Full of sweat and fear I jumped out of the bed, turned on my PC and entered three letters into my search engine 

CUA

Some seconds later my darkest dreams came true: the Internet, the only media invented by computer scientists, the source of all the wealth of good software answered

The Catholic University of America

Nothing about common user access, no standardized GUI’s - gone, away. Desperately I scrolled down the search list:
[ Cửa Sổ Tin Học ] Open Your Mind... – obviously some page in a language I could not understand, cua.dk - Storm's Free Software Collection – some extension to EMACS, but no word of a GUI, GO2VIET.COM: Online Shopping for Vietnamese – no idea how this came in the search result, Canadian Urological Association – at least here was clear, why Google did find it, CUA – a page just named like the standard ! From Australia. Could it be that the brainwashers missed this far away continent? My heart was springing when I opened the link and suddenly: disappointment: Credit Union Australia is a bank. The next: Official Khanh Ly Website – no idea how this came in the list, forums – “Best viewed in 800x600 and Vietnamese Unicode font”, I skipped it – and the last one CUA Columbus School of Law – obviously was not a page dealing with GUI standards.

No need to say that every one of these sites looked completely different from one another. No GUI standard.

Of course there were 898.000 other sites the search engine offered to display me, but I was so disappointed that I did not try to look further. It really seemed that the GUI standard that coined the look and feel of the most sold operating system on the planet was just lost in the cyberspace. No one seemed to care about.

But then I sat upright and said to myself: “No, not everyone has forgotten, I remember. And if I am the last one. I will bring back the knowledge about benefits of common user access GUI standards to the world.”  With these brave ideas a fell asleep again, dreaming about object-oriented programming, PHP5, pure HTML web applications and such stuff. 

This was the very beginning of the GGF project.

Many weeks later someone sent me an obscure e-mail with a link that I did not dare to open, you know viruses, Trojan horses and the like. Maybe you dare: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/313/ibmsj3103C.pdf Just tell me what it was (if your PC is still working then).