Imagine a world where there are no usability standards…

Every car make has its own way of placing essential controls. If you wish to accelerate a Toyota, you need to press your knee against the door while resting your foot on the breaks; this gives an incredible reaction time that saves lives. On a similar Peugeot, a small gas lever is placed between the seats, while the steering is controlled with your feet; this enables you to break fast, by punching the airbag. The break is the only pedal in a Corvette, while the new BMW has a joystick instead of a steering wheel.

All solutions are great innovations, and each car designer has a vast argumentation arsenal to why his control placements are the best.

This situation is somewhat similar to what we can experience if we just implement the new Web 2.0 ideas without considering using a set of well know standards. Standards that unfortunally does not exist yet.

An example is Microsoft’s new super AJAX search engine, search.live.com.
No one can argue with the brilliance in the new search result view. You no longer need paging, the view just loads on the fly while scrolling. It is also hard to find argumentation against the usability in the ability to search a site, by clicking a small magnifying glass next to the search result.

But the issue lies in the time I need to invest in learning how to navigate this brilliant interface.

We need a common ground, and a set of controls, that support the demands of the new generation online applications and websites. In a perfect world, these controls would be the same in applications as in online applications.
How about a couple of new W3C recommendations?

I would love to be able to implement the search.live.com result grid as easy as:
<livegrid provider=”results.aspx” loadsize=”20” />

But that is not an option, since it takes W3C years to accept new tags and concepts.

The way to go is to acknowledge a set of AJAX Defacto standard frameworks, which fulfill the most basic Web 2.0 requirements, and then go from there. Within a couple of years one will be the leading framework, and suddenly we have a full set of Web 2.0 industry standards, that everybody knows how to use. In order to make this work, we would probably need a World Wide Web 2.0 Consortium (Is w32c.com available?).

The ideology of Web 2.0 is great; make the web as easy navigate able as possible. But without standards, lots of sites and online applications will miss out, simply because of a steep interface learning curve.