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

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

#311

Post by simonebrunozzi » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 1:15 AM UTC

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,…

> Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet.

Amazing story, and I'm sure they've learned their lesson :)

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

#312

Post by exikyut » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 1:19 AM UTC

lykr0n wrote: post #234

neurostimulant wrote: post #182

This library allows you to compile your winform C# gui app into a set of html, js, wasm and dll files and run them in the browser: https://github.com/roozbehid/WasmWinforms Completely blew my mind! Probably not practical but really make me wonder if anything is possible with webassembly.

I think I've seen this in use for the Travis County Tax Office, or at least the vehicle licensing part. Looked exactly like a WASM app, but running in IE.

That might've been an ActiveX control.

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

#313

Post by haolez » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 1:38 AM UTC

radimm wrote: post #254

haolez wrote: post #142

I’ve always liked the approach of http://intercoolerjs.org/ . But I’m not a web dev and I don’t know the real reasons why it didn’t get traction :)

More people need to know about it.

One of the upsides for prototyping is that you don’t even need a JS build system: simply point your page to their CDN and you are ready to go!

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

#314

Post by zxcmx » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #44

This isn't a weird UI as such, but it's probably a technology that isn't explored enough. Back in the very early 2000s before Javascript was universally available, we wrote a CGI-based technology that worked by persisting the entire state of the page between clicks. It was a true widget-based server-side GUI, so you could build single page UIs by composing widgets such as buttons, labels, and more complex things, hie…

If I'm not mistaken this is pretty much how ASP.NET Web Forms work(ed). I think Java Server Faces (JSF) uses a server rendered component approach also. The giveaway being the need for a ViewState.

So for a long time this has been a widely used pattern! With today's dominance of (MVC || SPA) architectures I agree it's not as widely known as perhaps it should be.

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

#315

Post by thrower123 » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 1:56 AM UTC

zxcmx wrote: post #314

rwmj wrote: post #44

This isn't a weird UI as such, but it's probably a technology that isn't explored enough. Back in the very early 2000s before Javascript was universally available, we wrote a CGI-based technology that worked by persisting the entire state of the page between clicks. It was a true widget-based server-side GUI, so you could build single page UIs by composing widgets such as buttons, labels, and more complex things, hie…

If I'm not mistaken this is pretty much how ASP.NET Web Forms work(ed). I think Java Server Faces (JSF) uses a server rendered component approach also. The giveaway being the need for a ViewState. So for a long time this has been a widely used pattern! With today's dominance of (MVC || SPA) architectures I agree it's not as widely known as perhaps it should be.

You could do some heinous, heinous stuff the Web Forms and UpdatePanels.

Interestingly, Blazor seems to be reviving the whole idea. With SignalR, it is actually not completely insane to handle events with the equivalent of code-behind.

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

#316

Post by zmix » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #282

ratww wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think it was somewhere between the introduction of Javascript, browser plugins, and/or XMLHttpRequest.

I disagree. Nobody said, a document can not be "interactive". With new technologies, old terms expand.

What I am talking about is the total applification of the web, as it happened in the last decade.

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

#317

Post by pjungwir » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 6:13 AM UTC

Isotope is a pretty fun jQuery plugin: https://isotope.metafizzy.co/

An idea I read about long ago is ring-based context menus. So instead of getting a square list of choices, one per line, you get each choice arranged in a ring around your cursor. So maybe Copy is at 1 o'clock, Cut 2 o'clock, etc. It would be easier to "target" your choice, and even easier once you learned the position of things. I don't know if this has ever been tried. Maybe in a game? EDIT: apparently this is called a pie menu or radial menu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

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

#318

Post by kqr » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 6:32 AM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #240

namrog84 wrote: post #7

Go spend 5 minutes here on pc desktop. http://cyberspaceandtime.com/Gaano9Y6KAU.video+related I came across this site a few weeks ago. And it's quite unlike anything I've seen. And try to inspect the site using browser inspector. It's a very different ui than I've ever seen before.

Seems completely broken in Firefox and Safari, and mostly broken in Chrome/Chromium - just what browser does the site work with?

I browsed it using Firefox on Linux, and while rendering wasn't always perfect, it was a far cry from "completely broken".

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

#319

Post by zimpenfish » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

pjungwir wrote: post #317

Isotope is a pretty fun jQuery plugin: https://isotope.metafizzy.co/ An idea I read about long ago is ring-based context menus. So instead of getting a square list of choices, one per line, you get each choice arranged in a ring around your cursor. So maybe Copy is at 1 o'clock, Cut 2 o'clock, etc. It would be easier to "target" your choice, and even easier once you learned the position of things. I don't know if thi…

Been around since about 1969 and been pushed many times - https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

I seem to remember trying at least one X11 window manager that used pie menus back in the early 90s - but unless the apps have small menus with small labels, you just get chaos.

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

#320

Post by ahartmetz » Fri, Oct 04, 2019, 7:19 AM UTC

onemoresoop wrote: post #224

Xelbair wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Haha, yes, but thats just a static page not a website.

Everybody knows that real websites are generated in the browser using JavaScript, right? Right???