The Desktop Fishbowl
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Monday, 9 September 2002

One of the User Interface fads that emerged in the 1990's was ‘skinnability’, the ability to customise the appearance of an application right down to its controls and window decorations. Skinning continues to be a big hit amongst computer users who can now make their entire computer look like their favourite cartoon, but it presents a challenge to User Interface designers. Paradoxically, skinnability reduces the expressiveness of a user-interface. It does so by restricting the vocabulary of the interface to those things that can be expressed compatibly with all existing skins (or even all potential skins). This is a minor problem for applications, and a huge problem for platforms. Read the rest in Being Skinned, or if it's still sitting in the queue on kuro5hin, go vote for it. 12:47:02 PM