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0 pointshombre_fatal1y ago0 comments

The good use of time is that OP learned that labels should wrap their inputs, so the next 10,000 times they write a control on a form, they'll just do it off the bat.

That this post has 800 upvotes is just a reminder of the caliber of UI/UX experience the average HNer has, especially when you see them disparage UI development as something unworthy of their time / expertise.

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TimTheTinker1y ago

> That this post has 800 upvotes is just a reminder of the caliber of UI/UX experience the average HNer has

Or maybe it's our collective frustration with processes and expectations that make it very difficult to be a craftsman--and that make web app UI bad in general.

I remember my boss being frustrated with how long it was taking me to build a set of filtering dropdown components from scratch (one of the most difficult to get right). I stuck with it and put in some extra hours to really get all the small details right. Later that year, he asked me to tech-lead a newly forming team of UI engineers.

A year later, everyone called it great work and no one remembered how long it took.

ludwigvan1y ago

Did they? My understanding is they replaced gap with padding, didn’t necessarily wrap the input with the label (which they should as you suggest)

wruza1y ago

Yep, they used flexbox to nicely do… absolutely nothing useful beyond blogspam.

Next up “how I made my ui responsive but then heroically stopped labels wrapping away from radio marks”.

There’s a reason, even if accidental, why writing custom controls was sort of a black magic in traditional ui. And that reason is, most people are clueless about how fragile ui actually will be in their hands.

ryandrake1y ago

I guess what I learned from the article is how crazy it is that developers are still putting UIs together with text labels and padding and flexbox-this and align-that. What kind of stone age shit is this? Back in the '90s we were putting UIs together with controls already polished and perfected by the OS vendor, presumably backed by man-years of UX research from those companies. The controls themselves had styling, behavior, event handling, and so on baked in. Fast forward to today's web development, where we've regressed to drawing text inside rectangles and trying to handle click events on those rectangles, and/or wrestling with half-baked "frameworks" that poorly do some subset of what OS-provided controls did 30 years ago?? UI development seems like cooking in a clay pot over a fire that you had to start with flint.

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