Most human beings are not ready for the power of a modern personal computer. It does too much. It is too flexible to be fully understood. Its ability to infinitely morph makes its nature impossible to pin down, understanding too hard to fathom. It is fundamentally an abstract beast whos capabilities are unknown and seemingly boundless. It is a scary thing.
The physical form can be ignored as quite varied but not too striking. However the software which runs on the computer is incredibly varied. It is only getting more varied as websites become more feature rich. In a sense the web requires an OS revolution like the one which drove Windows. This means a set of consistent UI guidelines. The browser is the hardware, and the HTML is the software. How times change.
While there exist standards for the interpretation and display of HTML, there are no web UI standards. With Windows, these elements included how the window frames will look, how dialogs look, the start bar, the program manager, explorer, etc. This common look and feel reduced the barrier to entry for new users. The same thing is needed now in the web domain.
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