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I'm betting on HTML

catskull.net

71–80 of 458 posts

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#71
Mostly agree, but datepickers are still a problem. The range of user experiences is so broad, and sometimes so counterintuitive (fuck you in particular, Android), that I still hesitate to suggest a native date input.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#72
post #26

HTML is the solution to walled-garden lock-in? What? Those walled gardens already use HTML, including some of the semantic elements mentioned (plus ARIA semantic attributes, which are much more sophisticated). > ChatGPT-like interfaces are likely the future of human data access. And the whole point of artificial intelligence systems is that they don't require specialized "machine-readable" annotations in order to pro…

> ChatGPT (and its future offspring) can navigate regular websites the same way humans do. They don't need us to hold their hand.

It can?! It does that?

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#73
post #26

HTML is the solution to walled-garden lock-in? What? Those walled gardens already use HTML, including some of the semantic elements mentioned (plus ARIA semantic attributes, which are much more sophisticated). > ChatGPT-like interfaces are likely the future of human data access. And the whole point of artificial intelligence systems is that they don't require specialized "machine-readable" annotations in order to pro…

You don’t need a good old Python script using Beautiful soup, you can use an LLM with the added benefit of not dealing with that cruft.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#74

I had heard of almost none of these HTML elements, and that's such a shame, because they could seriously help put the "we need JavaScript for every gosh darn thing" ecosystem to an end (or at least return JS to what it was originally meant to be: a way to add some flair, some interactivity, some whatever, but not necessarily a replacement for all of your markup and a full-DOM manager). I'm starting to think my dream…

In general the issue with these built in components is that you can't theme them. And they stick out like a sore thumb when you get a windows 7 style component in the middle of a modern looking app. They also have basically no extensibility so when you inevitably need to do something half complex, you have to scrap it and start again with JS. So you may as well have just started with JS which just works, gives you fu…

>And they stick out like a sore thumb when you get a windows 7 style component in the middle of a modern looking app.

Wouldn't that be a feature?

"Modern looking" as far as I'm concerned means "Can't figure out WTF this bloody thing is." and that assumes I even know there is a thing in the first place.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#75
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Flutter for some web apps, it works fine. It's good for web apps, not web sites, and compared to other desktop or mobile apps, there is literally no difference between rendering on a canvas to rendering on Qt or SwiftUI. People, in my experience, just get up in arms about the web that does not happen with other technologies.

> compared to other desktop or mobile apps, there is literally no difference between rendering on a canvas to rendering on Qt or SwiftUI. Except, you know, accessibility. > just get up in arms about the web that does not happen with other technologies. And for a good reason.

Do you realize that Flutter has an accessibility system that is often more advanced than most desktop UI frameworks? [0] I notice this often from non-Flutter devs, Flutter has some pretty good a11y.

[0] https://docs.flutter.dev/accessibility-and-localization/acce...

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#76
post #26

HTML is the solution to walled-garden lock-in? What? Those walled gardens already use HTML, including some of the semantic elements mentioned (plus ARIA semantic attributes, which are much more sophisticated). > ChatGPT-like interfaces are likely the future of human data access. And the whole point of artificial intelligence systems is that they don't require specialized "machine-readable" annotations in order to pro…

> ChatGPT (and its future offspring) can navigate regular websites the same way humans do. They don't need us to hold their hand. It can?! It does that?

In its current form, not as far as I know. Even the OpenAI tutorial on this matter scrapes first and uses only normal text.

https://github.com/openai/openai-cookbook/blob/main/apps/web...

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#77
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ehh... more organized / better? Sure. Easier? Well, even if you don't have to deal with legacy styling (which had moments of insanity, like floats, and other things which were fairly reasonable, like tables, br, b, i), there is so much new CSS to replace the old: variables, transforms, complex animations, using borders to make arrows and other visual content, in flow vs out of flow, container queries, view transition…

CSS is huge. I wish there was a way to shed all that dead skin. Only 5% of it is truly powerful. Most of it is never used.

And yet, those rare times you need something you’re happy to know the feature is there.

There’s no point in removing stuff from CSS. The only thing that would do is break old websites.

If only 5% is truly powerful you can easily and happily use only that 5%

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#78
The point of walled garden is that they are very tempting to stay inside off for users. Their power comes from most users not resisting that temptation.

Becoming the equivalent of a digital hermit and living in a hole in the ground outside these walls, which is what I would characterize this as, is not going to result on a lot of people stepping outside those walls. If you've ever watched Life of Brian, you'll have a good mental picture here.

It's a variation of brutalist web development (let's not call it design) that just doesn't really appeal to the masses. It never has. The history of the web is endless attempts to pimp it with Applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, etc. The latest incarnation of that is web assembly. This basically allows you to use anything native that works elsewhere (desktop, mobile, game consoles, AR/VR, etc.) in a browser as well.

Of course there's a severe risk of this to disappear into more walled gardens. But I don't think sitting in a dusty old hole in the middle of nowhere while shaking your fists at progress does much to change that.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#79

Mostly agree, but datepickers are still a problem. The range of user experiences is so broad, and sometimes so counterintuitive (fuck you in particular, Android), that I still hesitate to suggest a native date input.

Gov.uk recommends against them. This should be enough to discourage most people.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#80

I had heard of almost none of these HTML elements, and that's such a shame, because they could seriously help put the "we need JavaScript for every gosh darn thing" ecosystem to an end (or at least return JS to what it was originally meant to be: a way to add some flair, some interactivity, some whatever, but not necessarily a replacement for all of your markup and a full-DOM manager). I'm starting to think my dream…

In general the issue with these built in components is that you can't theme them. And they stick out like a sore thumb when you get a windows 7 style component in the middle of a modern looking app. They also have basically no extensibility so when you inevitably need to do something half complex, you have to scrap it and start again with JS. So you may as well have just started with JS which just works, gives you fu…

JS does not 'just work'. This is why a lot of these custom components have bad touch interaction and no accessibility. Take the datepicker; the native mobile version works great, why annoy users with a custom component?
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