Tim Bray is right about sharecropping but I don't like his solution. He likes the web browser as a platform and I don't ... well, sometimes.

The web browser is good for text and links. Pages. Stuff read top to bottom. Simplicity. The web is good because it follows the paper/page metaphor. People already know how to use a page -- they read it. The only thing they have to figure out is a link. Linking was the web's killer feature and it's been around so long that almost everyone knows how to use it. So the web is easy .... sorry, it was easy before the graphic designers came along. :)

Now we have Flash and DHTML/CSS/JavaScript tricks. People are expected to know a lot more than reading and links. This diverges from simplicity and converges on win forms. This is not a coincidence.

Unlike popular opinion of late, dense widgets are good things. People can be trained to use tools with complicated user interface widgets. Just because you can't pick it up and have it be immediately intuitive does not mean that the software is a piece of crap. Sometimes training is appropriate and needed ... just ask users of tools like Photoshop and AutoCAD.

I think where people get mixed up is that everyone wants to have a fast adoption rate. Developers are hungry for users and to have a fast adoption rate, your software needs to be so easy to use anyone can learn it in a few hours. But with ease of use you sacrifice a lot.

1. Once your users become proficient and know the system, they cannot improve their workflow. Five clicks will always take five clicks, and the web's low-density widgets sometimes have more clicks than winform alternatives.

2. The web's simplicity and consistency is sometimes its downfall. People start to expect things to be simple because it's on the web. Links should be underlined. I should always be able to go "back". But sometimes the graphic artists win and links aren't underlined and the developers win and you can't go back because a form was submitted on the previous page and the results expired.

So the bottom line is you can't assume your users are ignorant newbies (thus, use a web browser) and then change the rules. You have to develop for the lowest common denominator when you use a browser (especially if you are a large site like Amazon or eBay, or you are trying to be *yikes* cross-browser compatible, which has nothing to do with so-called "standards") which seriously hinders your flexibility. Bray argues that can be a good thing and I agree completely with that ... but you have to realise what you are getting yourself into!

Winforms will stick around because there will always be a demand for dense widgets that have no place in a web browser. Choose your platform carefully.