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To Rich:

WinBoard is an application that runs locally on your PC, and displays a
Chess board there. You can enter moves by typing them, but the more common
way is to just drag the displayed pieces with the mouse to the square where
you want to move. You can put WinBoard in a mode where it accepts every
move (of the side that is to move) or where it checks if the move is
allowed. The latter of course only works for variants WinBoard knows the
rules of.

WinBoard is limited to rectangular boards, knows 22 piece type, can handle
variants with piece drops. Amongst the fully supported variants are Chess,
Shatranj, Xiangqi and Shogi.

WinBoard merely is a GUI, i.e. an I/O device for Chess moves, and it
takes care of such tasks as saving the game on a file in standard
(Human-readable) format, loading saved games for viewing, copying and
pasting games and positions to and from the clipboard. It communicates the
moves to entities that play the game. Locally this might be other processes
that think up the moves, with which it communicates in a text-based
standard language known as 'WinBoard protocol'. (The 'Chess-Engine 
communication protocol you found the link for) This protocol is the
current 'market leader', and there are litterally hundreds of engines
that understand it. The 'Universal Chess Interface' is a recent
competitor of WB protocol. Adapters between UCI and WB protocol exist in
both directions.

UCI is rather limited in its support for variants: It does go as far as
Chess960, but I believe Crazyhouse is already 'a bridge too far'.

WinBoard can also act as a 'client' to communicate with a Chess Server
over the internet (e.g. FICS, ICC). For this it uses a different protocol
(ICS protocol), which does supports 'variants' like losers and atomic,
and even Shatranj. But nothing beyond 8x8 boards.

Currently WB cannot be used to login on the CV pages. But if I knew the
protocol needed to play on the CV pages, I could make WinBoard support
that too. I have done the same thing for the Unspeakable-Variant server.
What I understand from Fergus, playing on the CV pages involves polling
html pages until you see a change, and then uploading your own move over a
TCP link. (Correct me if I am wrong, Fergus!)

Well, as they say, one program paints a thousand words, so if you really
want to get an idea what WinBoard is, you can try it out by downloading
from http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/WinBoard_F.zip , and clicking the
'Fairy-Max' icon in the downloaded folder. You can then immediately
start playing the Mad-Queen game, or select one of the variants in the
menu that the Fairy-Max engine (included in the download) plays, like
Knightmate, Capablanca, Shatranj, Falcon, Superchess, Courier. (Note it
does not nearly play all variants supported by WinBoard. If you want to
play Xiangqi, Shogi, Crazyhouse or Losers you would have to download other
engines for this.)