<rant>

I know: I'm a broken record, but there seems to be a depth of stupidity to the Pizza UI which just makes it such an easy target...

Consider this "funny once" joke. When I try and enter my credit card details these guys have programmed their Pizza interface somewhat better than these losers. Some standard UI metaphors work: for example when I go to Hell, I can at least tab correctly from one field to the next. Still though, when I arrive at a field which is a drop-down box, they clearly have so much control over the "user experience" that stuff like hitting the down arrow to select from a drop-down has to be handled personally, and the programmer appears to have forgotten to implement that sort of behaviour.

There are worse sins than the ones visited on people arriving at Hell. In fact the UI from Hell regularly receives awards - presumably from people who find it "novel". The judges probably don't actually buy Pizza over teh intarwebs so they haven't seen it before. Or perhaps they like black, because it's all cool and designery, or they are poorband users who normally have to access their pizza through the 0800 interface. Hopefully those people will eventually be replaced by people who have used the site and got over it. People who actually want to order Pizza, and just want a page where they can quickly and easily do so, and who are sick of chucking devils in the corner just so they can click on a button.

Using this UI to present a plain 'website' is surely just the worst ever though. I regularly find music artists with this kind of site too, which for me means "nothing to see here: move along". And I do, of course, since it is clearly going to be a learning curve understanding their designer's idea of a "user interface" before I can find the information I'm after. After a long succession of bad experiences along these lines, finding out more about the actual music from the Amazon website than from the artist's one, I've pretty much given up on them. In fact nowadays I just go straight to Wikipedia, which has an increasingly comprehensive collection of information about music and musicians.

I haven't seen a really serious website, that wants people to buy stuff, which has been written using the Pizza UI, in fact. I'd wonder why that is, except that it is basically obvious to anyone who regularly buys stuff on the internet (or anywhere, in fact) that increasing the barriers to your customers is not good business sense. Experienced programmers will also understand that the Pizza UI cannot be used unless the server interaction is sufficiently simple, and the presentation is the driving motive.

The fact that Google now use this technology in that one simple way is really interesting. One wonders if it stems from the fact that through an accident of historical bias against Linux by Microsoft and Apple, Google were left with this as their only choice for a platform-independent way of delivering video to the world, and particularly to the sometimes vocal and influential thought leaders in the FOSS community. Or is it a more insidious plot, to ensure that Google, which is primarily in the advertising business of course, wants us all to be able to watch next years advertising, and this is a way of ensuring that we all have an appropriate advertising presentation layer installed!

I don't think that the people over at Google HQ are quite that machiavellian yet, however, and I expect the explanation really is somewhere between "we saw someone else do it and it was clearly a good idea" and "that was all that would work on the three main operating systems".

</rant>

Well hopefully that's got all of the vitriol out of me, and now I can be all relaxed and friendly for the coming week at linux.conf.au 2007. I certainly don't want to offend all the other open source geeks flocking to the best linux conference, as Google puts it.