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

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

#291

Post by sesutton » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

brianpgordon wrote: post #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, n…

I'm fairly certain it was World of Warcraft. Also my AT&T router's UI does this, which probably explains why it's so slow.

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

#292

Post by shanemhansen » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #45

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,…

I had to do something similar once with FRRs (firewall rule requests) as a F50. There is one official way of requesting a FRR. What that way is a matter of some debate. Theoretically you file a JIRA ticket with fqdn, ip/mask, port, protocol info. Anyways cutting a long rant short I eventually had to write a script to generate 100 SRC X 10 DST X 2 ports rules as csv pulled into a spreadsheet.

After a couple days it was assigned to an engineer for implementation and of course the first thing he did was unflatten it.

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

#293

Post by debaserab2 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

diminoten wrote: post #271

debaserab2 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting a lambda based REST API is not "pennies a month" if your site gets any significant traffic at all.

Dimes a month, then? It's not a business-relevant amount of money, is the point.

Lambda is great for infrequent, high CPU tasks such as batch processing. It isn't ideal for high frequency low CPU tasks like serving web requests. You'll pay a large percentage more doing it this way. Whether that extra expense is relevant to your business depends very much on your scale (or if you're sitting on a boatload of VC cash, I guess).

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

#294

Post by bkanber » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:44 PM UTC

michannne wrote: post #96

thewway481 wrote: post #4

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

How do you fly?

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

#295

Post by orthecreedence » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:52 PM UTC

justusthane wrote: post #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.

Oh man, kind of reminds me of an animated version of Yvette's Bridal: https://yvettesbridalformal.p1r8.net/

Careful: the further you dig, the weirder that site gets. Made by some guy (a "world famous artist") who uses the site as some weird recruitment tool for his cult. You could spend an entire day on that site and not see all of it.

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

#296

Post by daosyn » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:54 PM UTC

Bong International [1] has done interesting and weird stuff. One of my personal favorites of theirs is bo en's website [2]. They have also done stuff for Bloomberg.

[1] http://bong.international/ [2] http://bo-en.info/

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

#297

Post by ssully » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 8:55 PM UTC

ag8 wrote: post #187

The rotating cube interface [1], where each of six parts of a form is on a different face of a cube. [1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11229/is-this-rotatin...

I am losing my mind at this. I thought it would kind of interesting if it let me move the block around, but it has it's own rotation that you cannot control.

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

#298

Post by debaserab2 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

benbristow wrote: post #279

debaserab2 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's spider renders JavaScript now. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-...

That doesn't mean it gets indexed the same. Consuming an SPA with rich UI interactions is much different than consuming a hypertext document that provides a conventional structure for content. SPA's like to do things such as introducing custom routing systems that hijack hyperlinks and simulate browser events through javascript. I'd be very skeptical that you'll end up with a result that's the same as plain old server side rendering.

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

#299

Post by teknopaul » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

Apache/Nginx SSI + fcgiwrap + bash scripts.

For little admin/monitoring ui for Linux servers this is crazy quick to build. Probably would not want such sites on the Internet. Pwnd instantly if you have shell shock

If you have a good set of cli admin tools #youmightnotneedphp :)

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

#300

Post by melvinroest » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 9:33 PM UTC

j-me wrote: post #82

melvinroest wrote: post #21

This is a bit of an odd answer, even in a question that expects odd answers. That is because it sounds so normal, yet I have Googled for it and almost no one advocates for it. They do maybe advocate for it in terms of design, but I mean in making actual static websites. Enter Google Slides: the product for your uncle Joe and aunt Lysa to create their own websites without knowing how to code! I even have an example we…

Wow, this idea brings me back to one of the moments that first inspired me to start down the path of web development. In 2007 I took a semester off and got a job as a teaching assistant for a special education classroom and was 1:1 with a child that LOVED computers but would get overwhelmed by the information density of your typical website - too many decisions would frustrate him. One week, we were learning about fa…

That's a truly heart warming story to hear!

I think you just upped my motivation even higher to be in IT.