If ever there were a candidate for John Gruber‘s semi-annual User Interface of the Week, this would be it.
Clearly, this interface is modeled after the terminal interface that clerks in the Virginia government use internally, and they tried to take the interface onto the web as directly as possible. They completely ignored the notion that the web is a different medium from a VT100 terminal.
In one respect, you’ve gotta be impressed: it had to be much harder for them to actually emulate the terminal UI on the front-end than it would have been to build a more web-appropriate UI, even if it’s just simple links. It makes me wonder if the web app actually just passes data to the terminal UI on the back-end, rather than actually working against a database directly.
That's pretty bad. But do you think they “built” this themselves or somehow used a tool that ported the VT100 to the web? My guess is the latter…
Think so? Maybe. I don't think I've ever seen such a faithful rendering before — you'd think that if there were a tool that did it, it'd have been fairly common in the 90s or something.
If that's the case, that tool needs to be found, taken out back, and killed.