AJAX Look&Feel

AJAX is everywhere ! You can go to almost any web site, it is using AJAX or talking about AJAX. Why ? Because we can now have on the web things like drag&drop, on-the-fly form validation, auto-completion, list reordering, … Great ! But wait a minute… Is it really new ? Well… not really. In fact any “fat client” application have these. You see, this is the thing : we have no more limit on our “thin client” applications !

OK. But what about Look&Feel ? JAVA Swing’s biggest complain is that it doesn’t have the look and feel of the Windows application users are used to. Can you see a common Look&Feel emerging for AJAX enabled sites ? I don’t. We talk a lot about Web 2.0. Will it come with a standard L&F ? In that case, what will it look like ? MacOSX Aqua, Windows Vista, Linux Kde or (Add you own) ? The fact that even Google doesn’t manage to apply a common L&F to all its web applications makes me a little pessimistic. The web looks like an old Amiga : nice colors everywhere, no common direction for GUIs. Seems like it’s always the same story we play again and again. (ps: think also about accessibility)