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0 pointsBrenBarn7mo ago0 comments

> The browser should be doing most of the heavy lifting by providing a full suite of minimally themed but capable widgets that require little to no JavaScript and can be skinned entirely with CSS.

Well, I'd prefer if it provided widgets that can't be skinned. :-) The theming should be the user's choice, not the app designer's.

> That alone would wipe out an incredible amount of complexity and if done right would make web dev as an experience vastly more pleasant.

I don't really care so much about the web dev experience as the web user experience. My experience as a user is greatly degraded by a bunch of web devs full of bright ideas about how to make their apps look, rather than using predefined widgets whose look is determined by me.

> Much of this complexity comes down to primitives being too primitive for the use case of web apps.

I totally agree with this, although I disagree about what the better alternative is. In my view it is partly this issue that's led to the disappointing profusion of "skinning". In desktop app toolkits you use a tree view, or a button, or a dropdown, or whatever. That widget's "identity" is based around functionality and its look and feel are not controllable by you as the app author. Instead, they're determined by the user's platform (color/font settings, window manager, etc.). That's a better model for users.

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cosmic_cheese7mo ago

For the record, I’d prefer native unstyled widgets in sites too, but that ship has already sailed so I figure it’s best if web devs can do things like have a custom styled popup menu with proper keyboard navigation, accessibility, etc without having to pull in a mountain of wheel reinventing JS.

strogonoff7mo ago

When look and feel of a widget are not controllable by designer, what ends up being is that people by whom it is controllable—who developed the widget, or the end user—become the de-facto designers. This is further complicated by the fact that “look and feel” can hardly be perfectly decoupled from how it works and its semantic content model (which in an ideal world the data to be skinned would be described in).

Though I can see both sides, there is a belief system in which this type of work is best delegated to professionals.

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