In the "hall of shame" you linked, they list applications which misuse radio buttons. Uh oh, call the police. Sure, there were a few inconsistencies. But honestly, up until the ribbon in Office, it was incredibly homogeneous compared to today.
In comparison, modern windows doesn't even hide its inconsistencies. Try right clicking on the desktop in windows 11. You get a dropdown with large item spacing and rounded corners. But then if you click "Show more options", the dropdown is replaced with a different dropdown with subtly different menu items, small spacing and sharp corners.
They aren't even pretending any more.
This isn't Kai's photo goo we're talking about here. This is core windows.
Unless you opted out, basically every application in the 90s and early 2000s was built using the core platform's UI library. There were a few exceptions, but the 90s were a golden age for platform consistency compared to today.
Now its hard to find any 2 applications on windows which use the same UI style. Firefox and explorer? Nope - the maximise and close buttons have a different style. Spotify? Nah thats some custom webview. Visual studio? Nope, thats using an old windows library. Whatsapp desktop? Qt. Intellij? Some java thing. And so it goes. Its an absolute zoo.
You can always make web form based applications without style sheets.
They're pretty fast to create, relatively consistent, simple and fast/easy to create.
That's not what people want, they want all the flexibility and features of say Gmail or maps. B along with some communication and flexibility. Not to mention running on every OS under the sun, and being able to use accessibility and screen reader tools on all those platforms.
> You can always make web form based applications without style sheets.
Uh, no you can't. Web forms aren't rich enough to build most desktop applications. You can't make vscode, gmail, slack or spotify using web forms. They're just a bad set of primitives for applications. (In the web's defense, it was never designed as an application platform).
Yet - we had some version of all of those applications in the 90s, on every OS at the time. And (mostly) using the platform's built in UI libraries so the look and feel was consistent and delightful.
Web forms are absolutely enough to roughly match the typical VB6 application. Especially the "easy" path mentioned. Not every app, but definitely most.
In comparison, modern windows doesn't even hide its inconsistencies. Try right clicking on the desktop in windows 11. You get a dropdown with large item spacing and rounded corners. But then if you click "Show more options", the dropdown is replaced with a different dropdown with subtly different menu items, small spacing and sharp corners.
They aren't even pretending any more.
This isn't Kai's photo goo we're talking about here. This is core windows.
Unless you opted out, basically every application in the 90s and early 2000s was built using the core platform's UI library. There were a few exceptions, but the 90s were a golden age for platform consistency compared to today.
Now its hard to find any 2 applications on windows which use the same UI style. Firefox and explorer? Nope - the maximise and close buttons have a different style. Spotify? Nah thats some custom webview. Visual studio? Nope, thats using an old windows library. Whatsapp desktop? Qt. Intellij? Some java thing. And so it goes. Its an absolute zoo.