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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?

#91

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

Having dependencies might not be a huge problem. But I've made some pretty complex interfaces using nothing but jquery, handlebars, and other util libraries. All patterns thought-out and written by myself. Not once did I feel I needed something more complex. I get the impression all the hype followers of front end frameworks might not have the best idea of what they're doing. Especially when you see people commenting about frameworks like angular/react/vue making jquery obsolete, because one is just a syntax enhancement library for dom manipulation, the others are predefined workflow patterns. I guess if you have to work on teams, or more corporate-y stuff, frameworks make sense, because programmers can be easily added or replaced. But luckily I've had the freedom to work on my own projects by myself, so I get the freedom to define whatever structure I see fit. Fun story: Somebody lectured me on how I should adapt my application to use one of those frameworks because it would reduce the code size according to him. Months later he complained about how he did just that with his application only to realize it made it more needlessly complicated and bloated.

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

#92
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.

WASM?

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

#93
I worked on a project before that explores using non-traditional UI on the web:

https://overwebs.ruph.in (warning - sound and high bandwidth)

It emulates a game UI, and uses background video to simulate physical movement when navigating between pages. It also incorporates some controls that are unusual for normal web applications like keyboard controls (shortcuts like 'Esc' to go back, 'Enter' to open chat).

It's a pretty old and very experimental project so some stuff is in a semi-broken state. I should revisit it sometime and clean up.

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

#96

it's just a proof of concept, but this web site discussed a few weeks ago absolutely blew my socks off: discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20929801 site: https://3dforreddit.com/r/pics From a comment: " How to use it Desktop: Click to start, WASD and mouse to move Mobile: Dragging on left half of screen is move, right have is look Append any subreddit to the url to switch subreddits " It should work in…

Crazy. I thought it was just 1 photo, then it turned into a gallery, then blew my mind when I saw I could see other viewers, then blew it again when I realized I could fly

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

#97
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't know that. Is there anywhere I can read about it?

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just hope that Google will keep pouring infinite money into making their JavaScript engine faster. And they never kept track of their dependencies in the first place. That's the job of some build tool. Whatever it pulls in is fine.

We target IE11 with angular1.6, React and Vue and it all runs very fast. The only time we ever had trouble were lists over a few hundred items long that our internal customers didn’t want paginated. But delivering those more demanding apps in react and vue solves all our IE11 is slow problems. On any other brothers the code might as well be native.

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

#99

I favor brutalism. A 1998 style design completely contained in inline code in the header. Using base fonts and features that are supported by all browsers. It has a unique capability: it loads quickly.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
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