Standards for Composable User Interfaces

03 Sep 2022 - 03 Sep 2022
Open in Logseq
    • One thing I like about working with Scratch-style UIs (aside from having fucking invented them) is that they standardize a large chunk of the user interface design. This has two good effects:
      • Frees the designer (me) to think at the level of blocks and kinds, and their connectivity at an abstract, linguistic level.
      • To the extent this is a known UI standard, saves the user some cognitive load in learning to use it.
    • This gave me the idea that the set of known UI standards (buttons, lists, fields, etc) needs to be extended so there is in fact a standard way to do this kind of composition of words, operations, concepts, or whatever can be represented by a block.
    • That is, it should just be part of a normal UI to provide a library of composable parts. At the moment, it's still a big deal, but something like that needs to be part of the standard affordances of software.
    • This is equivalent to saying that all applications should offer end-user-programmability, which I also believe.
      • I think this is one of those long-dead dreams. It might have been at least conceivable in the desktop-software era, and in fact, now that I think of it AppleScript basically does this, or at least provides the underlying framework for something that is truly suitable for non-programmers. But integrating web-based applications is so hard that an integration framework like that for web apps seems almost inconceivable.