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In web design, everything easy is hard again

frankchimero.com

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Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#91

Post by ktpsns »

Did anybody notice that the 1997's Hello World example https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-aga... still works? Open the most easy built-in text editor on your system (even on Android one should be able to do that, isn't it), save it, open it with your browser locally.

In some aspects, the evolution of the web is similar to what the C language ecosystem experienced. It was dead simple in the beginning --- however the "Hello World" is still the same! Today's users are more demanding in terms of user interfaces and you will not go far without libraries. Same story with building modern "reactive" websites.

I personally like that CSS got more powerful, it allows us to build modern websites without JavaScript. That wasn't possible 20 years ago.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#92

Post by aaron-lebo »

pka wrote: post #53
randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

> If anyone has advice on how someone who prefers rigour, simplicity, elegance, and decent PL design over the latest trend should approach web dev that would be massively helpful Sounds like Elm [0] (pure, functional, very very easy to start with but lacks abstractions), Purescript [1] (pure, functional, powerful, the best language for the web right now, imo) or ReasonML [2] (functional but impure, familiar syntax, f…

That's incredibly high praise for Clojurescript. It's got some great features but it has flaws, too. I feel like many people new to web dev would be more confused setting up a Clojurescript project than they would be with JS. It was a lot of googling when I did it a couple weeks ago, and that's coming from someone who has done several times over the years (what's this boot thing, I was told lein was the best thing ever?).

Those are all great languages. It is important to realize that they will increase bundle sizes, which is a common rant about web pages these days. Hello world in Bucklescript/Reason, for example, is 23 KB (anything touching the std lib at least), Elm much bigger than that. My friend's 500 line Clojurescript/Reagant app was over 500 KB uncompressed, 5k lines of JS will come in at 140 KB.

It's worth being aware of the tradeoffs you are making, because often when people are selling new tech they tend to overstate advantages and understate disadvantages.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#93

Post by sureaboutthis »

skrebbel wrote: post #68
sureaboutthis wrote: post #51

I have found lately that many web things today are based on fads and they have found their way into the standards. In the past, standards were developed through engineering and computer science. Today it's based on fireworks, explosions and emojis. Speed trumps quality. Do not want to think is the motto or slogan. If there is a framework or library I can use then, great, I don't have to know how it works so I won't b…

I wonder which recent new web standards you think are fads. Push notifications? Offline web apps? Multithreading? async/await?

Not a fad but an example of what I mean (and the only one I can think of this early in the morning). "box-sizing". This seems to have been created because people are unwilling or unable to understand the standard "box model". People find box-sizing is easier for them but it is not necessary as it only combines already available and well understood sizing properties.

Worse, many even use the '*' hack to apply it to every element on their site which should make one question forcing browsers to do something browsers don't do natively.

iirc, there was, or is, even an effort to make emojis part of the standard!

I hesitate to give any example at all because every person who doesn't know the box model will downvote my post for the very reason I gave in my original post.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#94

Post by BjoernKW »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #69
BjoernKW wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the 90s app is faster but can it consume and provide data over a network? Does it afford collaborative editing? Sharing data with others? You can now even use Google Sheets for creating web applications much like Excel has been used for creating desktop applications. Lazarus and Delphi in general certainly are great tools but they're also limited in terms of what types of user interfaces you can create with them…

> Yes, the 90s app is faster but can it consume and provide data over a network? Yes, AFAIK, though I haven't used the features much. > Does it afford collaborative editing? That's a new one, but probably less difficult to bolt on top of a desktop app than to make a desktop app in a browser. > Sharing data with others? Yes! Current model is actually a huge regression here. On the desktop, you have a file system. You…

> You can share files. In the cloud, each application defines its own half-assed abstraction over data storage, and you're limited to what the service allows you and/or the company was bothered to implement.

proposal-2-final-new-FINAL-draft-02-2018.docx isn't exactly sane data-sharing. With desktop environments you could use a version control system for that but that hardly ever happens in a consistent manner.

You can create walled gardens both on the desktop and the web. That's a question of ethics not technology.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#95

Post by pgorczak »

skrebbel wrote: post #36

When I worked in embedded systems and systems programming a decade ago, it was totally normal to spend over a day getting your computer set up after joining a new team. Sounds exactly like what the author describes here, so what changed? What changed is that the browser became a popular application platform, forcing frontenders to deal with the stuff everybody else has been doing for decades. I'm not saying this can'…

Not sure if this is about comfort. Those complicated workflows and interfaces pretty much go against the principles of what designers are trying to achieve with their own work.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#96

Post by petra »

randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

>> If anyone has advice on how someone who prefers rigour, simplicity, elegance, and decent PL design over the latest trend

Low-code tools are worth a look, depending on your task. Due to some reason, they are rarely mentioned at HN, But they already work very well for business apps, with some tools even claiming "pixel-perfect" ui creation, so maybe it can work well for consumer apps too.

And Amazon/Microsoft and Maybe Google are all working/having on such tools, so it may indicate these tools are becoming popular.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#97

Post by pmlnr »

ktpsns wrote: post #91

Did anybody notice that the 1997's Hello World example https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-aga... still works? Open the most easy built-in text editor on your system (even on Android one should be able to do that, isn't it), save it, open it with your browser locally. In some aspects, the evolution of the web is similar to what the C language ecosystem experienced. It was dead simple in the begin…

20 years ago was 1998. CSS was the modern thing. JS was called DHTML and was used for mouse trailing bouncing balls. XMLHttpRequest debuted natively in IE6, which was released in 2001, before that, it was ActiveX and nobody used it.

You did create modern sites with CSS, without JS.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#98

Post by BjoernKW »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78
BjoernKW wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that the web page itself is a pretty innovative concept. The concept might've existed before (Apple's HyperCard dates back to 1987 for example) but the web expanded on that by making use of resources distributed across the network. There have been many smaller improvements, too. Google's Material Design for instance.

> There have been many smaller improvements, too. Google's Material Design for instance. Could you elaborate on that? I.e. how this is an improvement, and over what? Serious question. My overall impression is that it promotes dumbed down interfaces that maximize wasted screen space while minimizing amount of useful information displayed. But I might have just bad luck and constantly encounter applications using Mater…

The material metaphor and the purposeful use of animation ("Motion provides meaning"), dimensions and visual perspective in my opinion is an improvement over merely arranging information in grids.

It's a fresh approach to displaying information in a meaningful and consistent manner.

Both the new Google Calendar and Contacts application are decent Material Design applications in my opinion.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#99

Post by always_good »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
aaron-lebo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting frustrating how much these discussions get dominated by people who self-admittedly haven't used a technology very much and then rant about it. Besides what you brought up, the package manager thing doesn't even make sense. I'd suggest that inexperience/ignorance isn't a great place to analyze anything from. Some of the "major" issues that dominate these discussions are not problems in practice.

A counterpoint is that people develop Stockholm syndrome over especially broken technology, and immersed long enough will no longer register just how ridiculous some aspects of it are.

It's easy and lazy to assume that you're the enlightened one and everyone else has some defect like Stockholm Syndrome that keeps them from seeing the light.

Other people simply accept different trade-offs than you.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#100

Post by always_good »

skrebbel wrote: post #72
grndn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say the same thing. :) The fundamental problem is that you want one piece of (semantic) content to be presented on many different platforms with very different design approaches. The current approach uses if-then-else conditions in CSS, and when that fails, if-then-else conditions in JS, and when that fails, complex JS to transform the DOM. The XML/XSLT approach, although clunky, might actually be bett…

You can't honestly propose XSLT as a programming language in a thread where half the comments are about how shitty JavaScript is. I mean, JavaScript isn't God's gift to mankind, but XSLT? I have a very hard time coming up with a worse programming language than XSLT, across all dimensions. INTERCAL, maybe? If XSLT had been proposed as a satirical esoteric programming language, people would've laughed and believed it.…

It's simply a way to brandish your nerd cred.
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