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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?

#281
post #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?

I think the site predates it? Apparently the websites been like this for many years.

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

#282
post #258
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, why you folks do not * build your own runtime * running in your own window * using your new protocol * using a sane UI language Because the way it is now, the document centric web well may be destroyed, sooner or later by trying to fulfill more and more non-document needs. And we know, how that goes: where the money is...

I think the document centric ship sailed around 1993 when HTML forms became a standard.

I think it was somewhere between the introduction of Javascript, browser plugins, and/or XMLHttpRequest.

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

#283
I think briefly it was considered cutting edge to have your page content be delivered as an XML document, with an accompanying XSL or XSLT file to mechanically translate the XML into a full-fledged XHTML page suitable for rendering in a browser. I even saw it once on some public website, I think maybe for a Blizzard game? The content XML looked great; very intuitive. The XSLT stuff for translating into XHTML, well, not so much.

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

#285

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,…

Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain. When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

> When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Not entirely. Sometimes they were replaced by applets, which are just native application wrapped in a thin layer of html. This causes its own set of problems. At one place I worked (a large government agency), a critical spreadsheet ran as an applet which was only compatible with IE9. They couldn't upgrade anyone's PC's because they risked an auto-update of IE, which would break the ability to run that app.

At another job, a certain time tracking application ran as an applet, requiring a specific version of the jvm to be installed.

Deploying an application that runs in the browser using the browser's native capabilties - js, html, css works great. Using it to embed an applet doubles the misery, as in the short term management thinks they've purchased a portable, always-compatible "web-app", while what they've done is bought a native binary they can no longer properly provision their workstations to run.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain. When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

> When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief Not so fast. As a web developer we still had to contend with the horror of IE5/6/7 for a few more years, and initially WITHOUT anything resembling the utility of something like JQuery!

I remember being happy when IE7 came out, because it fixed a bunch of CSS bugs in IE6, and also finally supporting PNG transparency meant that whole new kinds of design were actually possible ... feels so weird knowing what we can do today with CSS and be reasonably sure it works in three major browsers.

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

#287
https://www.kickscondor.com is really bizarre.

Animated backgrounds, infinite scrolling, elements that are only partially visible until you mouseover them, and uses zooming interface for opening individual posts.

Feels like a bastard child of GeoCities and modern web.

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

#288

I think briefly it was considered cutting edge to have your page content be delivered as an XML document, with an accompanying XSL or XSLT file to mechanically translate the XML into a full-fledged XHTML page suitable for rendering in a browser. I even saw it once on some public website, I think maybe for a Blizzard game? The content XML looked great; very intuitive. The XSLT stuff for translating into XHTML, well, n…

I helped maintain (and later started rewriting) a medical web platform that used XSLT for it's HTML exactly like you described. It was powerful for sure, but a nightmare to maintain, extend or add to.

This in house framework was written before the advent of major web frameworks (at least in C# at the time) so I can understand where it came from. In fact, I still consider it an impressive feat of engineering. But XSLT to this day makes me shudder..

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

#289
repl.it's jobs page[1] is basically a bash terminal running on the web. You navigate it by using standard commands like cd and ls, and read files with cat, more or similar. This is NOT a bash emulator, this is an actual bash, running in a Docker container somewhere. repl.it lets you build an app, in almost any language, on the web, and run it. If it's a console app using stdin/stdout, they even provide you with a terminal emulator. Well, that's some pretty impressive instance of dogfooding.

[1] https://repl.it/jobs

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