When I read a piece by Paul Krugman wondering if economists of the 1970s knew more than those working today, I said the same question must be asked about software developers. It seems to me we had it all working better before we switched to the web. We probalby never should have tried to make the web a GUI. But there you have it. (And if Microsoft, Apple and Sun hadn't been such BigCo's it might have happened.)

That's why Bootstrap makes a difference. It encapsulates in one place all the design assumptions. I don't want to have control over how the menus look. I learned that when I started making Mac software. It's a good thing if all menus work the same way. So if Bootstrap is a good thing, how much more can we simplify things by factoring out the look and feel and burying it even deeper and further away from the program logic? There's the answer. It belongs in the browser itself. There ought to be the idea of menus in the language that goes over the wire and is rendered in machine language by the browser. And all menus should work exactly the same way, whether you're in Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, Tumblr or on JetBlue's website or whitehouse.gov.

This is not a new idea. This is the idea of the Macintosh in 1984.