Can't you make the argument that the web killed consistency in UI design a long time ago?
The web has always been a completely blank slate from a UI perspective and what happened was that defacto UI/UX "standards" continue to grow and evolve. Someone will always try to do something completely different. But thats okay it pushes the boundaries a bit. You'll still have a lot of apps that use the consistent tried and true UX methods but some will flaunt these and push where UI can go. Path and the Band Of The Day apps both do this beautifully. Both are non-standard but very easy to navigate.
I think Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation are trying to bring some of that consistency back into the Web. Even completely unique applications with their own design and functionality are easy to navigate when they start with these frameworks.
For example, Roll20 [http://roll20.net/], an online RPG tabletop, is a full-featured web app that is easy to use even though it's quite complex, partly because they worried about designing a custom UI on the macro scale, leaving the micro scale (buttons, form elements, etc.) to Twitter Bootstrap.
I totally agree. The whole idea of responsive design that those types of frameworks promote is exactly the type of defacto standards that arise out of the mishmash of web UI/UX.
Initially all apps looked and felt different. It wasn't until apps started to live within a window on the desktop that consistency became a popular topic and concern.
My thoughts exactly. Every piece of software on the 8-bits and prior had a drastically different feel, even given the technical constraints.
But in the wake of MacOS and Windows 3.1, "native look" suddenly became a highly-touted feature. I think now that this was a result of low experience with desktop apps leading managers to "fake it till they made it" - presumably the OS makers invested more time in UX than the average app developer, so aping look+feel would get them a little closer to a "good" app.
Limited? I wish. Remember all those sites with the big cyan comic sans image text banners? I'm glad the web's wild days of experimentation are a decade in the past.
Limited indeed. Comic Sans was one of the ~11 web-safe typefaces that you could count on pretty much everyone to have. Now that there's a bunch of good-looking embeddable typefaces, people don't face as much temptation to use shitty Comic Sans.
The web has always been a completely blank slate from a UI perspective and what happened was that defacto UI/UX "standards" continue to grow and evolve. Someone will always try to do something completely different. But thats okay it pushes the boundaries a bit. You'll still have a lot of apps that use the consistent tried and true UX methods but some will flaunt these and push where UI can go. Path and the Band Of The Day apps both do this beautifully. Both are non-standard but very easy to navigate.