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

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 364 posts

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

#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

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

#74

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

I've been using Preact and the Parcel Bundler for my small projects, I'm able to build awesome stuff like I would with React, but with a few kbs of dependencies and no configuration file !

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

#75
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…

Sounds a little bit like Seaside: https://github.com/SeasideSt/Seaside/blob/master/README.md

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

#76

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.

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.

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

#78

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.

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.

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.

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

#79
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.

I'm glad to see this site making progress and gaining attention. I remember it used to be "GNOD":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980

Also similar, and by another HN user:

https://diskprices.com/

https://battprices.com/

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

#80
Using Behavioral Programming you can write UIs mainly using event traces. The state of the app is not really contained and managed in the usual way: it's based off of the state of many concurrent threads running at the same time. Here's a TicTacToe example: https://lmatteis.github.io/react-behavioral/
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