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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?

#43

Post by mirimir »

TekMol wrote: post #27

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.

Wow, that is amazing !!!

But then, I love scatterplots.

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

#44

Post by rwmj »

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, hierarchically (like native GUIs). The whole page would reload between clicks but everything was so lightweight and tiny that wasn't actually much of a problem, at least by the standards of the day.

It's all open source but probably doesn't compile on modern machines, and of course for extra fun we wrote the entire stack including the webserver, CGIs, cooperative threading, database layer and C libraries from scratch. From top to bottom this is the entire stack:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=monolith.git;a=summary

http://git.annexia.org/?p=rws.git;a=summary

http://git.annexia.org/?p=pthrlib.git;a=summary

http://git.annexia.org/?p=c2lib.git;a=summary

Edit: I should say that it's obsolete if you can make the nowadays reasonable assumption that Javascript can be used on the client side. It's more like "this is the crazy shit that a team of developers in their 20s with VC funding, disfunctional management and time on their hands get up to".

Edit 2: It was used in production for quite a long time, certainly until the 2010s. If you were in a UK school in the mid 2000s there's a chance you might have used this.

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

#45

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

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, several runs required to make an end to end connection. It wasn’t custom programming, just taking full advantage of the browsers of the era’s inability to render the UI component for that. So I was building out a data center and needed Something like forty thousand cables run which translated into around one hundred and fifty thousand segments. I tried to give this info via a spreadsheet but they were steadfast that the web interface was the only way they could receive it. So I wrote a script to just post the data directly without going through the UI, ran it, and went home. Turns out all their web form did was e-mail the values to a half dozen people. The e-mail system was Lotus Notes (dates this) so each person got their own copy and there was a lot of overhead. The sudden influx of a million e-mail messages brought down Chase’s email system for two thirds of the country. They spent days clearing the mail queue and recovering - they had to fly in IBM techs with suitcases full of disk drives to add the storage needed. Everyone who received the wiring requests spent days deleting them with new ones arriving as quickly as they deleted the old ones. Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet.

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

#46

Post by bronlund »

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.

That is insane!

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

#48

Post by Roritharr »

jacobush wrote: post #17
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.

What the hell is this?! TempleOS gone social network?!

Best description so far. My mind is melting.

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

#49

Post by porker »

TekMol wrote: post #27

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.

OK this is awesome! Thanks for sharing, it fits my nerd-brain like a glove. Wish it would generalise to everything in life like my own spreadsheets (I say that as a compulsive data-collector)
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