User interface engineering is subject to a strong “technology pull”; this is not likely
to change in the next few years. A positive consequence is the overall effort dedicated
to the development of interfaces and the development of tools for building interfaces.
A more questionable consequence is the current standardization process; a user interface
standard could jeopardize the possibility to create a new generation of UIMSs, in a similar
way as GKS made it difficult to create direct manipulation interfaces and multi-threaded
dialogues.