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

This is a bit of an odd answer, even in a question that expects odd answers. That is because it sounds so normal, yet I have Googled for it and almost no one advocates for it. They do maybe advocate for it in terms of design, but I mean in making actual static websites.

Enter Google Slides: the product for your uncle Joe and aunt Lysa to create their own websites without knowing how to code!

I even have an example website for you that I made as it is a project that I'm working on in my free time. I already remade the website in actual HTML/CSS/JS but I was simply curious how well Google Slides would work. IMO, it has a thing or two over Sketch (such as displaying GIFs, having links) since I made the actual layout with Sketch, and then redid everything with Google Slides to do a side by side comparison (I went too far with this :P).

There are a few things to consider:

1. Every page needs to be made in its own slide show as you cannot have different document sizes.

2. You will be stuck with a slide viewer, but I figured for the industrious fellow, you could simply inject some JavaScript that disables that whole viewer when you iframe your Google Slides website.

3. There are zooming issues because the pages are of different document sizes.

4. The fact that you need to define document sizes is noteworthy in itself.

So yea, not super duper practical, unless you aren't a web designer and simply want a simple profile page online, but definitely weird :D

Example website / project that I'm working on (and recreated to the best of my abilities in Google Slides for fun): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRxqg4SNv1Sl...

I have been thinking about this weirdness a lot. In my book communicating via electric currents while seeming weird, isn't because of it's pure practicality. Digitizing these currents instead of transmiting an analog signal seems weird, but isn't because it allows faster, errorfree and more diverse communications etc.

You can go on and follow the technical developement, but you will inevitably reach a point where people stopped understanding the whole stack below them and instead started to cobble together new abstractions from the things they did – until the next generation came and abstracted that. We all know this – it is far easier to add onto something existing, than removing or changing existing things that are just not good enough for the things we want.

So at a certain point you stop doing the rational and efficient thing to solve a problem, but react to more or less organically grown structures and go a extra mile to solve problems you might have never had if you included these capabilities in the existing layers below. But the existing layers below were written ages ago in languages you hate by obscure circles talking on mailing lists, so we don't even bother. The resulting Rube-Goldberg-Machine is weird in that sense: nobody rational who understands all the layers would plan it like it is from the ground up if they had the choice.

Possibly the closest "mainstream" product to Hypercard-on-the-web?

(Actual Hypercard is on the web now too: https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks )

This website uses scatterplots instead of lists to display products:

https://www.productchart.com

So on Product Chart, you can for example say "Show me 300 smartphones and put the price on the x-axis and the size on the y-axis".

It's a bit like you would lay out things on a table and then organize them by some criteria.

http://www.dontclick.it/ is a super old (Flash) demo of a UI that doesn't have any clicking