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Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

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Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#111

Post by jho406 »

I wrote a library for React, Redux and Rails. Allowing you to build SPA without APIs. https://github.com/jho406/Breezy

Breezy's insight is that frontends are wildly complex due to the industry vertical (say.. childwelfare), so instead of shaping your state for business, breezy shapes it for content. Content being a header, footer, body as opposed to a post model or user model. This means each page is represented as a node in the Breezy Redux tree with its own header body and footer.

On one hand, it is annoying to traverse the pages to make updates, on the other, I can look at any running application and make close-to-correct assumptions on how to update the store. After all, most applications regardless of industry vertical has a header, body and footer somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#113

Post by gameswithgo »

enlyth wrote: post #60
mosselman wrote: post #10

I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.

Says everyone on HN while relying on these weird UIs to do their job daily.

Yeah and I hate that I have to rely on them. They are usually terrible.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#114

Post by FlorianRappl »

mister_hn wrote: post #71

I think the weirdest way is using React. I mean, it feels so unnatural for me, compared to the jQuery way. You have to download thousands of packages, keep track of various dependencies and their security holes, adding an overhead for auditing them. HTML5 with jQuery IMHO still beats everything in simplicity and getting work done fastly

I just saw three dependencies (arguably even less): https://www.npmjs.com/package/react

Don't know how you reach your conclusion.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#115

Post by krapp »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #97
krapp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of those "apps" are still just documents with client-side rendering, though. And the web was designed with the intent of running code practically from the beginning, albeit with support envisioned for multiple languages, so programmatic elements in a website aren't really a perversion of the original intent.

I didn't know that. Is there anywhere I can read about it?

https://eager.io/blog/a-brief-history-of-weird-scripting-lan... mentions support for multiple languages, including TCL.

And the possibility of scripts is mentioned at least as far back as HTML3[0] in 1996, with the script tag being added as a placeholder element in HTML 3.2[1], and Java applets were already supported.

So while it wasn't there at the very beginning, it's clear the architects of the web didn't consider running code in the browser to be antithetical to its purpose.

[0]https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-script-960131.html

[1]https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0004...

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#116

Post by [deleted] »

jho406 wrote: post #111

I wrote a library for React, Redux and Rails. Allowing you to build SPA without APIs. https://github.com/jho406/Breezy Breezy's insight is that frontends are wildly complex due to the industry vertical (say.. childwelfare), so instead of shaping your state for business, breezy shapes it for content. Content being a header, footer, body as opposed to a post model or user model. This means each page is represented as a…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#117

Post by FlorianRappl »

louismerlin wrote: post #74
mister_hn wrote: post #71

I think the weirdest way is using React. I mean, it feels so unnatural for me, compared to the jQuery way. You have to download thousands of packages, keep track of various dependencies and their security holes, adding an overhead for auditing them. HTML5 with jQuery IMHO still beats everything in simplicity and getting work done fastly

I've been using Preact and the Parcel Bundler for my small projects, I'm able to build awesome stuff like I would with React, but with a few kbs of dependencies and no configuration file !

This is the way. Unfortunately, many people don't know about Parcel and assume that adding 20 Webpack plugins (plus their configuration) is a proper way.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#118

Post by marapuru »

osullivj wrote: post #61
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #45

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…

Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I guess the lesson is that mgmt diktat in corp envs repeatedly inflicts crappy solutions on captive users. Plus ca change!

No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#120

Post by laszlokorte »

ryanianian wrote: post #64
8jef wrote: post #36

Weird? Maybe. Super simple single page responsive website, no JS, CSS + HTML only: https://isabellegrell.com/

Love "low-tech" solutions to UI experiences. But to be sure, toggling the individual sections does use javascript (view-source -> see 'toggle_visibility').

using the :target selector or invisible radio buttons it would not even need to
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