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Sometimes answers come from unlikely quarters. I’ve found a new source of answers to my questions about the utility of sequences in web apps, that is so luxuriously afforded by Borges. Microsoft use the paradigm of Inductive User Interfaces ui/html/iuiguidelines.asp to describe a more sequential user interface (link via Mike Dub). A snippet that caught my eye:

IUI is an extension of the common Web-style interface. In the Web environment, pages have to be simple and task-based because each piece of information has to be sent to a server over a relatively slow connection. The server then responds with the next step, and so on. Good Web design means focusing on a single task per page and providing navigation forward and backward through pages. Similarly, inductive navigation starts with focusing the activity on each page to a single, primary task. from the MSDN ml/iuiguidelines.asp article

Its interesting (to me) because it recognises the actual, live practice of modalising web apps – yet Microsoft themselves have always pushed the app model on the web that is more like a traditional desktop UI, with pages that handle their own input, rather than pushing through a sequence.

Regardless, the reference has got me athinkin about the usefulness of sequences, and has nice examples to drill it home.