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Better front ends
Jul. 23rd, 2004 09:19 pmAfter being interviewed for a Wired article on the subject, Jeffrey Zeldman reviews the history of the practice of constructing unsolicited makeovers of hard-to-use Web sites.
He mentions instances from 2001. The first case of this that I remember is older than that: it was Jeremy Nixon's alternate Deja.com Usenet archive interface, which, amazingly, is still up and seems to still work, though it has been rendered less essential, since the Deja archive has become Google Groups and its own search interface is not so bad. Nixon's effort showed up during the sad period when it seemed as if the former DejaNews was hell-bent on making their formerly useful service as unusable as possible in the service of some ill-conceived Web-portal business model.
He mentions instances from 2001. The first case of this that I remember is older than that: it was Jeremy Nixon's alternate Deja.com Usenet archive interface, which, amazingly, is still up and seems to still work, though it has been rendered less essential, since the Deja archive has become Google Groups and its own search interface is not so bad. Nixon's effort showed up during the sad period when it seemed as if the former DejaNews was hell-bent on making their formerly useful service as unusable as possible in the service of some ill-conceived Web-portal business model.