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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?

#251

Post by debaserab2 »

rmdashrfstar wrote: post #186
collyw wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep the majority of the rendering server side and it isn't a problem at all. Jquery for some UI enhancement.

Why would I choose server side rendering? If I build the site in vue with the most optimized output settings, append hashes to files for perfect caching, drop the files in an S3 bucket, throw a CloudFront CDN on top of it with gzip compression, and build the front end of my backend as a REST api sitting in a lambda function that serves HTTPS requests, I never have to worry about server costs being more than pennies a…

Hosting a lambda based REST API is not "pennies a month" if your site gets any significant traffic at all.

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

#252

Post by neurostimulant »

melvinroest wrote: post #21

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 we…

That reminds me about one other use for the slides editor like power points and google slides: creating posters. It's much easier and faster for an inexperienced person to create a poster from scratch (for your paper, conference talks, etc) with those slides editor than using vector graphic editor like inkscape or coreldraw.

It's probably already obvious for people who regularly uses google slides / keynote / powerpoint, but for me who very rarely use them (but often use various graphic editors) it's quite a revelation.

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

#253

Post by moonlighter »

smacktoward wrote: post #197
AndrewStephens wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain. When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Notes was a double-edged sword. It could be as terrible as you've heard, but on the other had it also let non-programmers build surprisingly useful applications all by themselves. (Which is part of why it stuck around for so long -- being useful, those apps tended to get wedged into critical parts of the business process, which meant you couldn't just pull them out and throw them away.)

Notes was conceived in 1984 and at the time was an amazing platform which featured a secure client/server architecture, RSA encryption, data replication and offline support. Both the Notes client and the server (later renamed to Domino) needed to run on multiple platforms (Win 3.x, OS/2, Netware, NT, Alpha, RISC systems etc), and while the code was native C code on each platform, all UI of the client was implemented using an abstraction layer called NEM ("Notes Environment Manager"). Likewise, all database storage was abstracted in NSF ("Note Storage Facility"; and Notes databases to this day still have the .nsf extension). Long story short, the NEM layer was a trade-off between portability and consistency across platforms. And, Notes used F9 to refresh data, way before the Windows standard of F5 was a standard...

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistor...

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

#255

Post by krapp »

romaniv wrote: post #202
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.

>And the web was designed with the intent of running code practically from the beginning This is absolute nonsense. In the beginning the web didn't even have inline images. It was a text-only protocol. https://www.wired.com/2008/09/history-of-img-and-embed-tags/ Cookies and script tags were hacks added by Netscape, IIRC.

>This is absolute nonsense. In the beginning the web didn't even have inline images. It was a text-only protocol.

Maybe you misinterpreted my comment. "practically from the beginning" does not mean the same thing as "from the beginning." I think something that was considered to be a part of the HTML spec, regardless of how it came about, since the 1990s counts as "practically from the beginning."

>Cookies and script tags were hacks added by Netscape, IIRC.

Tim Berners-Lee didn't seem to have a problem with the premise of embedded scripting in HTML in 1992[0], albeit not with the script tag and JS per se. And my comment was more referring to whether or not executing code in a browser was considered a legitimate use of HTML and the web at the time - and clearly it was, albeit not universally. That paradigm wasn't something Netscape just "hacked" in and entirely forced upon an unwitting web.

[0]http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1992/0064.html

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

#257

Post by kls »

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

It's pretty much been the standard way to develop UI's since smalltalk. If you look at the old Windows (IIRC 95) render loop, and squint just enough you see react. It's not the greatest, but no one has devised better way to do large app UI dev across teams other than component models. React is just that model bolted onto JavaScript much like the win api was for C++. Before jQuery there was Dojo and by a few months YUI, React is really just a focused and cleaned up version of Dojo's component lifecycle model. React's novelty was the virtual DOM and it was a big leap in realizing web components without sacrificing performance.

jQuery got popular because it was easy, and good for quick and dirties, but it fails when you try to scale it to more than a few developers. It's not a bad tech but you can paint yourself into a corner with it pretty quick if you have to scale it across a team. You see bad code happens. Black boxing is a way of limiting bad codes impact on the overall system, because it is easier to rip it out and replace it. Functional programming is black boxes for back end business logic. Components are black boxes for the UI. It protects me from you and you from me and therein lies the importance of it.

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

#258

Post by ratww »

zmix wrote: post #223
icedchai wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Web development is "weird" because we (developers) are basically constantly trying to put square pegs into round holes. Over the past ~25 years, a document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system. The underlying, fundamental technologies were not intended for "UI" app development.

I wonder, why you folks do not * build your own runtime * running in your own window * using your new protocol * using a sane UI language Because the way it is now, the document centric web well may be destroyed, sooner or later by trying to fulfill more and more non-document needs. And we know, how that goes: where the money is...

I think the document centric ship sailed around 1993 when HTML forms became a standard.

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

#259

Post by yazan94 »

mthoms wrote: post #191
grenoire wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but unfortunately the HTML structure is quite horrible. It is built less like a web page and more like an Excel spreadsheet. Makes it terribly hard to parse automatically.

If anyone else suffers from Table-Layout PTSD like me, I encourage you not to open your developer tools like I just did. Kidding aside, I love you HN. Don't ever change.

Oh wow... table-ception is real

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

#260

Post by Epskampie »

mrighele wrote: post #221
collyw wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is pretty minimal in terms of UI. I like it for that.

The UI could be improved on mobile. The links are quite close one to each other and I regularly tap the wrong one, especially when I want to hide a tree of comments or a topic on the main page.

Also, for some reason code blocks are not full-width. Infuriating.
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