So, the impeccable Dustin Curtis (whose blog posts are individual masterpieces) has set up a project that will come up with an “SDK” for web interfaces.
The mission is to make something like the iPhone/iPad Human Interface Guidelines, but for the web. I like the idea, but I think it’s more of a fun thought experiment than a useful checklist for any web designer. Just have a look at Dustin’s own blog posts (or Jason Santa Maria’s for that matter). They’re both examples of (blog) web designs that push the limits of what design could also be, and it would be sad to see it constrained by a strictly formed guideline.
On the other hand, big scale websites like eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter etc. all seem to battle some of the same problems; showing vast amounts of information in logic ways. Obviously there are many books on the subject of information architecture and information management (*ahem* even a study at CBS), but they seem to offer advices on how to go about the structuring, not give constraints for the designers to work within.
So, is it even necessary to have a standard interface guideline for web design? And if so, what should it be like?