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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?

#61

Post by osullivj »

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,…

Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I guess the lesson is that mgmt diktat in corp envs repeatedly inflicts crappy solutions on captive users. Plus ca change!

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

#63

Post by xRahul »

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,…

That has got to be the worst system to not have any type of stop gate in the API.

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

#64

Post by ryanianian »

8jef wrote: post #36

Weird? Maybe. Super simple single page responsive website, no JS, CSS + HTML only: https://isabellegrell.com/

Love "low-tech" solutions to UI experiences. But to be sure, toggling the individual sections does use javascript (view-source -> see 'toggle_visibility').

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

#65

Post by helltone »

ggerganov wrote: post #40

Not sure if this counts as weird or novel web UI, but I wrote a small library to stream Dear ImGui's vertex and index buffers to browsers via websockets, and just render them using WebGL's drawElements [0]. There a couple of examples linked in the README for anyone interested. [0] https://github.com/ggerganov/imgui-ws

This is wicked cool, nice work!

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

#67

Post by ahartmetz »

jstimpfle wrote: post #16
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's indeed weird. How would they not lose track of their dependencies? How do they keep their code lean and load times fast?

They don't need to keep their code lean and load times fast because the speed of their average target CPU doubles every two years anyway... oh wait!!

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

#68

Post by quixoticaxolotl »

This is more of a joke answer, but r/ProgrammerHumour recently underwent a spate of submissions competing to come up with the wackiest and "wrong" ways to do common UI elements, such as the slider or phone number inputs.

A small album of the best and worst of these submissions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6fdl8h/an_...

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

#69

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

I used to work at a company that behind the scenes had to use a web UI in a weird/novel way for their system to work.

This company's web UI would allow its users to initiate bank transactions. Nothing weird from the user's end. However, the company had to "approve" the transactions in real time, synchronously. The company could do all sorts of programmatic verification on the user, recipient, transaction, etc, but we had to actually physically press a button on the screen of a smart telephone to approve the transaction. There was no programmatic way around this.

Some programmers at the company came up with a robotic arm which could be controlled programmatically, which would do the telephone screen pressing for us.

I always thought that was pretty clever.

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

#70

Post by reitanqild »

enlyth wrote: post #60
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.

Says everyone on HN while relying on these weird UIs to do their job daily.

Not only that, - I sometimes create them as well. At least I try to avoid it where possible.
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