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johan.hal.se

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Re: Care

#51

Post by _factor »

jachee wrote: post #16
chime wrote: post #9

Web and modern tech can be fantastic if you take away the dark patterns. The UX for booking a flight isn't complex because reserving a seat or taking your card is difficult. It's complex because low margin businesses like airlines can make more money up-selling extra legroom or travel insurance. Take away the dark patterns and incentive to eek every last dollar from the user and the entire web can be neal.fun.

Take away enough dark patterns and you eventually kill Capitalism. :)

I know you’re being mildly facetious, but profit doesn’t come from thin air (or does it?). If you spend $.30 to grow and ship bananas and charge $1, that $.70 difference is just a made up number by what you hope is a fair market. A dark pattern is just a way of maximizing that difference unethically.

I’ll ignore the clustering and trust structures that form naturally, but those are long-term dark patterns as well.

Re: Care

#52

Post by wraptile »

One successful formula I've found is to generate only positive or dilligent content but freely contribute and reply to any content. For example, I'd refrain from complaining on Mastodon about some app update being broken but I'd reply to relevant news posts with criticism if required.

This dichotomy allows to separate contribution and self expression more clearly for my own well being. I don't want to create more whining but if there's something already going on maybe there's something constructive I can add or empower a worthy voice.

Re: Care

#54

Post by skgough »

_factor wrote: post #50
Zak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no browser-native no-JS way to submit a form and use the response without loading the whole page again I think a lot of badness comes out of the desire to avoid loading the whole page again. Sure, there are lots of more desktop-like webapps where that's definitely undesirable, but a whole lot of interactions are just fine as a page load, as long as the page load itself doesn't suck.

The real problem isn’t the page load, it’s that it’s visible. If only one picture and a bit of text update, why does the whole screen have to blink?

The view transitions API addresses this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/View_Transi...

Re: Care

#55

Post by smaudet »

lmm wrote: post #38
crooked-v wrote: post #10

I feel like a lot of the problems with web UX come from browsers never natively implementing even basic functionality needed for many web apps, like comboboxes, menus, tab panels, etc. Then there's the endless layers of fiddly work needed to make accessibility work cross-platform (check out all the work Adobe puts into the react-aria project for an example), and that there's still fundamentally no browser-native no-J…

> I feel like a lot of the problems with web UX come from browsers never natively implementing even basic functionality needed for many web apps, like comboboxes, menus, tab panels, etc. This is completely backwards IMO. The problems come from browsers natively implementing all of these things, in ways that are almost, but not quite, good enough for those web apps. The browser has the Python standard library problem…

> But for some reason web folks and especially HN seem to hate the few parts of the web technology stack that actually work well (Javascript, NPM)

Actually, the parts that are "awful" and "unfixable" work great. You still need a DOM to render anything whether its CSS or JS. Without all the parts that make a browser, well, a browser (that you seem to hate), you have a glorified JS engine.

But maybe you are a guy who likes doing everything in their own custom graphics engine, you can have your canvas and javascript-based UI (ew, hard pass) and render everything like molasses except on 24 core monster desktops...

> Reimplement almost all of the things that are currently implemented as browser builtins as web components instead, move them out of the core rendering engine and into what are effectively polyfills-in-reverse; make the actual "browser" piece only implement div/span/canvas or something

There's no reason to do that last part, and in fact its really terrible news for not just compatibility but also any sort of accessibility. I guess you don't care about blind, disabled people, or people in different markets, 24 core video game guy... or maybe you do and you'll re-implement the browser...in your browser! What a great idea...

Now, as far as web components go, we should have default impls of nearly everything. You can, and probably should, have some ability to customize the render of individual elements (what web components brings to the table). But you don't get to change default behavior _because you feel like it_. There's no point to writing web-apps otherwise. You are far better off just writing in a "native" language where you have full control anyways.

Re: Care

#56

Post by smaudet »

_factor wrote: post #51
jachee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take away enough dark patterns and you eventually kill Capitalism. :)

I know you’re being mildly facetious, but profit doesn’t come from thin air (or does it?). If you spend $.30 to grow and ship bananas and charge $1, that $.70 difference is just a made up number by what you hope is a fair market. A dark pattern is just a way of maximizing that difference unethically. I’ll ignore the clustering and trust structures that form naturally, but those are long-term dark patterns as well.

> profit doesn’t come from thin air (or does it?)

It doesn't. Its supposed to come from your operating costs (cost of living + insurance costs). That is supposed to be where the prices come from, the problem is the insurance...if the cost of insurance approaches infinity due to infinite uncertainty, then "dark patterns" become "coping mechanisms". Not that I'm saying airline booking websites are in the moral right here, or anything - but someone thought they needed a raise, or to provide stock holders with a quarterly increase, because of rising cost(s) (or greed, but that's just another way insurance costs increase).

Re: Care

#57

Post by [deleted] »

_factor wrote: post #50
Zak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no browser-native no-JS way to submit a form and use the response without loading the whole page again I think a lot of badness comes out of the desire to avoid loading the whole page again. Sure, there are lots of more desktop-like webapps where that's definitely undesirable, but a whole lot of interactions are just fine as a page load, as long as the page load itself doesn't suck.

The real problem isn’t the page load, it’s that it’s visible. If only one picture and a bit of text update, why does the whole screen have to blink?

[deleted]

Re: Care

#59

Post by hawski »

crooked-v wrote: post #10

I feel like a lot of the problems with web UX come from browsers never natively implementing even basic functionality needed for many web apps, like comboboxes, menus, tab panels, etc. Then there's the endless layers of fiddly work needed to make accessibility work cross-platform (check out all the work Adobe puts into the react-aria project for an example), and that there's still fundamentally no browser-native no-J…

Regarding a form submission without a reload I got this idea years ago:

If the page that is loading has the same origin as the page before it the browser would do the equivalent of DOM diffing and replacement.

Basically doing what those new batch of JS libraries did in browser.

Re: Care

#60

Post by WA »

lmm wrote: post #39

> I feel like the web used to work better. Not in the sense of features or flagship sites—web-based email clients and word processors and image editors are all waaay better than they used to be and I would say the high-quality stuff is of higher quality than ever. I’m not pining for the HTML-only version of GMail, I promise. But if I were to estimate some rough median of “how well do websites work” I would also say t…

> and just rendering their system via one big canvas element

Interesting perspective, but I'm not sure if this would really solve the problem. You'd have to implement so much functionality that we take for granted (selecting text, copy & paste, accessibility, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). If you don't want to do it yourself, you have to use a widget library or some kind of UI kit. Maybe like Flutter. The web-version of a Flutter app renders everything to canvas (with a lot of caveats).

Since people bring their own UI libs for their JS-CSS-HTML web apps all the time, they will probably do the same with a pure canvas implementation and the result would be even shittier, because half of them will forget basic functionality.

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