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0 pointsthecrazyone8y ago0 comments

Well _it is_ crazy. We can't trace an alternate history and work with that. We work with what we have.

I think, here, we might looking at it with the wrong lens. I'm unable to find the right words to say this. Let me say this statement feels ungrateful. Web is the largest and fastest growing ecosystem of software we've right now (refer: community size, number of projects on github, say, in Javascipt, CSS, and other web technologies).

You're comparing what is what should've been. By that measure, any human activity will fall short of not only yours but anybody's expectations.

You'd think that getting sane layout control is easy, but apparently it's not. Getting a lot of humans to agree on a fast growing technology is hard (it seems like).

PS: I'm not saying "nothing could've been better, be happy with what you have", not at all. I'm just saying this seems like complaining and a better approach is to try and make it better

I needn't have written up a long tirade for such a simple statement. I see that this is the same sentiment that's espoused by several others in this thread, and thought I'd try and provide a different perspective to look at this with

edit: formatting

0 comments

bayonetz8y ago

Fair enough. I just get sad knowing what I'm missing. I've worked with a bunch of desktop GUI builder IDEs (Visual Basic, .Net WinForms, WPF/XAML, and Qt) and I've seen the immense power they have in terms of developer productivity and application performance. Something like XAML is especially interesting because it brings the styling and responsiveness of HTML/CSS to the GUI builder paradigm. I started off with them and then have slowly transitioned to working entirely with web technologies (PHP, Rails, Angular, React, you name it). Not without reluctance for sure! It's a Faustian bargain to me -- trading off overall inferior technology and developer experience for the sheer reach and ease of deployment of the web. It's nuts to me to design a visual thing like a UI by writing lines of code. The GUI builders of yore really nailed this by allowing you to design something visual using a visual modality (drag n drop, realtime layout designers, etc.). I try to explain this folks who've only ever developed for web and usually their eyes glaze over. They can't seem to (or have an incentive not to?) appreciate the impedance mismatches and the fundamental trades being made with web user interfaces.

vinnymac8y ago

Your perspective is very interesting to me. It makes me think that as software gets better/easier to write, as web development has become lately, people want to question why it is becoming better/easier. I think this self-reflection we have all been doing on the web is what is causing people to post so many threads and articles with this being the topic.

mike_hearn8y ago

Sane layout control for apps was a solved problem 15 years ago (well, for some definition of sane). Look at toolkits like Swing, GTK2, Qt, heck even Cocoa has better layout control for apps than HTML.

Flexbox is essentially an import of those concepts to CSS. There are no new ideas there.

But now flip it around and try to make a beautiful, responsive document in Swing or GTK. The layout managers that make them so great for laying out UIs won't help you much there. They can do it, they have layout managers that operate somewhat like a CSS box flow, but it won't be as natural or as easy.

So it's worth considering if it's easier to evolve HTML towards sane layout management for app-like things, or GUI toolkits towards sane layout management for document-like things.

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