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

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301–310 of 364 posts

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

#301
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I had the same idea long ago: creating a website-like functioning slide show. There was no Google Slides back then so I used Powerpoint and I had no way of putting the "website" on internet.

PowerPoint provides the ability to save as a web page [0]. [0] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-powerpoint-presentat...

This seems to be for Windows only as I tried to do it with PowerPoint for Mac and I couldn't seem to find the option.

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

#302
post #228

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.

> document delivery system has been perverted into a application delivery system The Web is much more than a document delivery or archiving system, it is hypertext and the boundary between hypertext and apps is fluid. Is Wikipedia an app or a collection of articles? Is HN an app or a collection of comments and links? There is no precise boundary. When Berners-Lee invented the Web he was heavily inspired by Hypercard…

There is no precise boundary, you are correct. However delivering a blob of minified, obfuscated Javascript code that renders the entire UI is obviously an "app", not a document. Web stuff that does entirely client side rendering is an abomination, IMO.

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

#304

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,…

>(dates this) Unfortunately, it doesn't. https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/...

I thought IBM bought it and killed it

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

#305

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 did it just on my own accord back in 2009 or so.

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

#306
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually shocked at the downvotes. The previous post was discussing the problem of all the layers of abstractions, and I was pointing out that a "10x programmer" could be getting 10x results by finding ways around those abstractions.

Probably because HN is mostly frequented by programmers, and not managers or "startup entrepreneurs" who throw around terms like "10x programmer" as if it's a thing that actually exists, and not a harmful concept that at best promotes gatekeeping and at worst promotes egotists who believe that their sloppy shortcuts won't have to be cleaned up by everyone else when they inevitably fail.

I thought I originally heard about the 10x programmer thing from some of Chuck Moore's talks on Forth. So I went to re-find this article.

But as it turns out he was arguing against 10x complexity and advocating avoiding abstractions with "1x" coding.

http://www.ultratechnology.com/1xforth.htm

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

#307
post #111

I wrote a library for React, Redux and Rails. Allowing you to build SPA without APIs. https://github.com/jho406/Breezy Breezy's insight is that frontends are wildly complex due to the industry vertical (say.. childwelfare), so instead of shaping your state for business, breezy shapes it for content. Content being a header, footer, body as opposed to a post model or user model. This means each page is represented as a…

This is actually really cool! I am definitely gonna try this this weekend, awesome work :) How complicated would it be to do something like this for Ember, is it tightly coupled to react and redux? I might give a try at forking it.

Yes give it a go and ask me any questions :). I was hoping someone makes use of it. It's tightly coupled to Redux, but not React. I don't think it will work great with ember, and I say that because Breezy doesn't require any router or models (again Breezy is about the content state as opposed to business models). It reuses your Rails routes much like Turbolinks.

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

#308
post #171

Last time I checked Gtk has a web backend, meaning you can run basically any gtk app with the right environment variables and it'll pop open a browser with the app rendered pixel perfect into it. I don't really think it's useful as an actual web technology since you'd need to spawn a process, reserve a port, and keep a connection open for each and every user which seems like it wouldn't be workable. It's a neat trick…

It's called Broadway, and still going on:

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2019/03/29/broadway-adventures...

https://people.gnome.org/~alexl/broadway-gtk4.html

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

How do you know what CPU my HTTP requests need?!

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

#310

I used to work at a company that behind the scenes had to use a web UI in a weird/novel way for their system to work. This company's web UI would allow its users to initiate bank transactions. Nothing weird from the user's end. However, the company had to "approve" the transactions in real time, synchronously. The company could do all sorts of programmatic verification on the user, recipient, transaction, etc, but we…

Easily the most amusing thing I've read all day.

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