Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have been thinking about this weirdness a lot. In my book communicating via electric currents while seeming weird, isn't because of it's pure practicality. Digitizing these currents instead of transmiting an analog signal seems weird, but isn't because it allows faster, errorfree and more diverse communications etc. You can go on and follow the technical developement, but you will inevitably reach a point where peo…
> "In my book..." As I was reading, for a second there I thought you'd actually written a book called "Communicating via electric currents seems weird". Sounds amazing! Where can I buy this book??
Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
201–210 of 364 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#202Earlier 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.
>And the web was designed with the intent of running code practically from the beginning
This is absolute nonsense. In the beginning the web didn't even have inline images. It was a text-only protocol.
https://www.wired.com/2008/09/history-of-img-and-embed-tags/
Cookies and script tags were hacks added by Netscape, IIRC.
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#203I 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,…
Heroic! Lotus Notes was such a pile of junk. Every time I used it for the simplest task, the combative UI would cause my blood pressure to spike up. I would calm myself down by imagining the blissful life of the ex JPMorganChase IT boss who greenlighted the purchase, living off his giant kickback on some Caribbean island.
Press F5 to refresh, like in every software. Except it closes Lotus Notes.
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#204I'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.
Server side rendering is very underrated.
It's true! For details, just ask anyone you know who was evangelizing client-side rendering three years ago, they'll tell you all about it.
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try build a complex website with complex journeys and a component architecture and you'll be begging for React. It's probably because you haven't seen the light. I'd never ever go back to using jQuery unless it was for a basic marketing site - even then I'd probably think of using Vue if anything got more complex than a carousel on the page.
Keep the majority of the rendering server side and it isn't a problem at all. Jquery for some UI enhancement.
Actually rendering is something that would be better suited for client side. You can cut down on message sizes if you just fetch JSON and a small templating engine.
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#206Vimium may not be a web UI itself but it layers on top of them, and I have found it to be a way more efficient and concise way to navigate the web.
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
> https://diskprices.com/ These do not compare things such as sequential read, sequential write, random read, random write, temperature, MTBF, Backblaze outage percentages (statistical relevant), type of storage (SLC, MLC, AMLC, QLC, TLC, etc), chipset used, and so on, and so forth. I'm scared shitless to check or use the battprices.com as it probably does not do anything like the above either. Which, in case of batt…
Dude, they’re just simple lists of products by their base metric, in both cases limited to reputable brands.
No fires will ensue just because you now know Duracell offering X is slightly cheaper than Energizer type Y per kWh even though the pack costs more.
Breathe!
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#208This 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_...
Absolutely glorious times
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#209Zircle: A frontend library to develop zoomable user interfaces
Smart home dashboard example: https://zircleui.github.io/docs/examples/home.html
Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds weird if you phrase it in a weird way, yes. Just like communicating with strangers via on-demand electric currents is weird as well, if you phrase it like that.
I can push ideas into other people mind by sending carefully created pressure waves at them
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