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

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241–250 of 364 posts

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

#241
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.

Is there a name for this kind of chart? It doesn't seem to be a scatterplot in the traditional sense because the axes aren't on a regular interval (If you look at adjacent phones the difference in prices aren't even).

Its more like a scatterplot with a grid overlay?

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

#242

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

[deleted]

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

#243
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep the majority of the rendering server side and it isn't a problem at all. Jquery for some UI enhancement.

Why would I choose server side rendering? If I build the site in vue with the most optimized output settings, append hashes to files for perfect caching, drop the files in an S3 bucket, throw a CloudFront CDN on top of it with gzip compression, and build the front end of my backend as a REST api sitting in a lambda function that serves HTTPS requests, I never have to worry about server costs being more than pennies a…

Am I the only one to whom this description sounds like some version of hell?

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised no one has created a VAAS Volume as a Service

That's a great start up idea - Cloud based UI elements.

With a feature where arbitrary aspects "update" from under you in ways you could never expect and ensure beforehand are locked down in your favor in the contract/agreement.

For example, a widget might have a compile bug where the CSS rules to explicitly lay out component size only get included in media queries requested with devices using such low PPI that you never catch it in testing because your devices are not icky enough. This "bug" might then be "fixed" in an "improvement release" down the track that ships the explicit sizing to everybody... including your page layouts, which are now broken.

Or maybe you could ship a calendar control that includes a fuzzy date parser, and then remove the date parser "because it was confusing too many users". All emails from power users pointing out lost productivity because of their inability to specify dates like "2 1/2 days ago" or "-2h", or having "2018" map to today's date last year and "yesterday" also include the current time, are quietly sent to /dev/null. The calendar control is updated to use Material Design, two days of which are spent building a test jig to autoreload on 18 devices at once using remote debugging, as part of a subfeature sprint to ensure a certain cubic-bezier transition animation (which 4 people have collectively watched 537 times) "flows" correctly with the right... twang. A further day is spent turning an Arduino into a virtual bluetooth keyboard to ping the 18th device in the aforementioned testing rig; it stubbornly refused to not go to sleep, even when plugged in.

A decentralized bidding infrastructure could be implemented that uses Bitcoin to allow users to vote on which UI designs they like the most by sending money to different wallets. Much ado is had about how to rebuild a Merkle tree from first principles on top of the blockchain in order to implement the wallet tracking needed to power the aggregate collection needed to power the feature. After A/B testing (and some shady network sniffing) finds the UI library is only being used by people with 1Gbps (fiber/5G) Internet connections on devices with 8-core CPUs, it is decided to simply download the entire Bitcoin blockchain into the Web browser of every consumer of the UI toolkit to perform the analytics about which style to load on startup. No testing is performed on smartphones, and in the standup meeting for the sprint in question nobody remembers to point out that 8-core ARM CPUs are not the same as 8-core i9s. The stubborn team lead has sufficient karma to retain the feature even after the stunned bugreports flow in.

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

#245

I once made a calendar UI that used D3 to animate little circles that represented days. Switching from e.g. week to month caused the circles to flow to new locations. It had a pastel color scheme and it was really beautiful. Everyone who came into the office and saw it said things like, "I've never seen anything like this on the web." It was just eye candy really. It never saw the light of day. I begged them to put i…

What were the investors' objections, if you don't mind me asking?

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

#247
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I choose server side rendering? If I build the site in vue with the most optimized output settings, append hashes to files for perfect caching, drop the files in an S3 bucket, throw a CloudFront CDN on top of it with gzip compression, and build the front end of my backend as a REST api sitting in a lambda function that serves HTTPS requests, I never have to worry about server costs being more than pennies a…

Am I the only one to whom this description sounds like some version of hell?

Not at all. Poe's Law is definitely in effect for that post.

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

#248

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

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.

I bet your marketing manager will be pleased when her website gets de-ranked on Google because all the page rendering is done client side now.

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

#249

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

If you like that way of working try replacing jQuery with Vue.

No need to use Webpack, Babel, etc, but you will get lots of nice modern features that will make your life easier.

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

#250
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you really don't. What you do, is you write your back end based on the assumption that you have no JS at all, using a server-side MVC framework like Rails or Django or ASP.NET MVC. Make sure that your controllers and views are well-factored and that you're using partial views where appropriate. It's then almost trivial to apply intercooler to the front-end. In a lot of cases, you don't have to change anything at…

Would you still use it today? Sometimes I would like to write simple web apps behind a login page, but the complexity of mainstream frameworks (and their build systems!) makes it not worth it to me.

I have absolutely used it recently, and I find it a pleasure to use.
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