Everybody says the Web is ugly, unreliable and hard
to use. In the May 15, 2000 issue of
Forbes, Daniel Lyons
tells us about people who are trying to do something about that. The main beef is
with the browser, the staple of Net-alive desktops throughout the world. The Web's
early designers probably erred by dumbing it down to make it all work. Roy Stringer of
Amaze Ltd. believes the basic problem is that typical Web sites arrange information
in a hierarchical structure. This leads to continuous wrong turns. A better approach,
Stringer reasons, would be to arrange a Web site's information as points on a
globe. This structure, called a "navihedron",
makes each point no more than three clicks away from each other. Later this summer
Amaze Ltd. will release its software free for any Web site to use. Stringer's experiment points up a growing
dissatisfaction with the way the Web looks and works. Many critics blame the
browser and are trying to develop new ways to navigate the Net. Several companies,
including Excite@Home and
Microsoft are developing three dimensional
Web interfaces in their research labs. Later this year, Amaze Ltd. will debut its
own browser, specially geared to animations and video. But displacing such a pervasive, if antiquated,
software tool as the browser will be a huge challenge.
Jakob Nielsen, a well-known usability expert,
says, "For seven years we've had close to zero progress in enhancing the user's
main tool for using the Internet." The big problem with the typical browser is that
it relies on the metaphor of pages in a book; you can view only one page at a time,
then click on another. Other beefs about the browser? Links go in only one
direction, so it's difficult to retrace your steps. The arranging of information
sometimes makes no sense, and many sites are just plain ugly. It may seem unfair to
blame the browsers for sins of bad design, but some say it contributes to the mess
by forcing designers to build in a limited way — the stack of pages. Stuart Card and his research group at the
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center are working
on an alternative called Web Forager which lets you gather dozens of Web pages into
a "book" and store these live links on a "shelf." Take down a book and you can flip
through the pages without waiting for each to load. Look at several at one time in
a 3-D workspace. Another PARC-related effort from
Inxight Software aims to let users view a picture of an entire Web site before
diving in. For now, some companies are trying to make the best
of a bad situation by creating Web-based applications that hide the browser.
Unext.com makes online educational software that
runs on a browser; once the program is running, the browser disappears.
DoDots Inc. sells software that lets you view
a handful of miniature Web pages, each in its own little window, without having to
run a browser. Another effort from designer
Theodore Nelson, inventor of the term
"hypertext", seeks to create an entirely new structure. He envisions a "floating
world" in which the user "flies" through 3-D space as objects morph and pass around
him. Just one problem — he has no idea how long it will take to make it work.
For now; the only consolation is this — even a bad browser is better than
none at all.
Future Shock