Why Verbs? « Not The User’s Fault

Description

Now that I’ve blogged about Ubiquity [http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/why-verbs/], you should understand why I’ve been obsessing over the properties of a good linguistic UI [http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/language-based-interfaces-part-1-the-problem/]. It’s not an academic problem: It’s one of the interfaces to the extension I’m working on right now!
Some commenters have asked me the question (if not in these exact words): Is a linguistic UI the right kind of UI for Ubiquity, and if so, why?
(”Because Jono is obsessed with linguistic UIs” isn’t a good enough reason.)
First, the really big picture of what Ubiquity is supposed to be all about: It’s a step towards a Web where verbs (i.e. functionality, i.e. commands, i.e. services) are first-class citizens. And that’s why I’m thinking it should be renamed from Ubiquity to something like “Mozilla Verbs”, maybe.

Creating and sharing nouns — i.e., web pages, i.e. content, i.e. data — on the Web has always been very easy. All you have to do is give someone a link to a URL, and they can see your content. The Web was designed around this idea from the very beginning [http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html]. But the modern Web is not the relatively static library of information that was originally imagined. It’s full of pages that do stuff. Some of them do so much stuff that we don’t even call them “web pages” anymore, we call them “web applications”. The modern web is full of sites that exist to provide a service rather than a list of facts. You can google something, you can digg something, you can slashdot something… The modern web is full of verbs! The next generation of web interfaces will need to make sharing, creating, interlinking, and combining these verbs as easy as the hypertext paradigm made it to share, create, interlink, and combine nouns. Aza wrote a great post about this, called Sharing Streamable Functionality.
So, keeping in mind that that’s the goal, there’s a couple reasons why a linguistic UI could be better than a point-and-click UI; not for every use case, but for many of them.
The first reason is that a point-and-click UI requires every verb to be graphically represented as an icon or menu item. As the namespace of commands grows, it becomes hard to find places to put all those icons and menu items; the advanced stage of this disease results in terrifyingly bloated GUI apps like Microsoft Word. On the other hand, having zillions and zillions of commands is not a problem when you can simply type the one you want. (Provided, of course, that you know the one you want, which is why I’m so concerned with learnability.) “Zillions and zillions of verbs” is where I think we’re going, because of how easy Ubiquity makes it to create verbs and share them.
The second reason is e ...

Original URL

http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/why-verbs/

http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/why-verbs/