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Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

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Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#181

Post by berkes »

wvenable wrote: post #101
jakelazaroff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no longer true! You can do it in CSS with a combination of `@starting-style` and `transition-behavior: allow-discrete`. [1] Another gotcha you'll run into is animating the height. A couple other new features (`interpolate-size: allow-keywords` and `::details-content`) will let you get around that. [2] Modern CSS is awesome. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/entry-exit-animations [2] https://nerdy.dev/open…

I can't see how a bunch of esoteric incantations are better than just some straight-forward easy to understand and follow JavaScript.

Is that "straight-forward easy to understand and follow JavaScript" the whole thing written from scratch? Or does it use libraries (that use libraries, that use libraries)?

Because I've written my share of javascript-from-scratch in my time - before npm and such. And even if my use-case was limited, in order to get edge-cases and details working - issues long solved by their HTML/CSS counterparts - we needed more and more JS. Many of which handwritten polyfills, agent-detection, etc.

Seriously, things like scrollbars (because the client insisted on them being consistent across user-agents) or dropdowns (because they had to be styled) "visited" state on links, in pure JS are thousands of lines of code. Maybe not today, anymore, IDK, with current APIs like the history API or aria labeling. But back then, just in order to make the dropdown work with screen readers, or the scrollbars react well to touchpads -in the direction the user was used to based on their OS- took us thousands of lines of JS, hacks, workarounds and very hard to follow code - because of the way the "solutions" were spread out over the exact right combination of JS, HTML and CSS. Edit: I now recall we got the web-app back with the comment "When I select "Language" and start typing "Fr" I expect French to be picked and "enter" to then put the language in French". We spent another few days on functions that collect character inputs in memory and then match them with values. All because "flags in front of the names were of crucial importance".

So, maybe this is solved in modern HTML/CSS/JS. But I highly doubt it. I think "some straight-forward ... JavaScript" is either an `import { foo } from foobar` or a pipe-dream in the area of "programmers always underestimate hours"

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#182

Post by kaoD »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #149
normie3000 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animations are also a way to explain causal relationships between interactions and their results, and to help build mental models of software behaviour.

Being related to neither software behavior nor the structure of the underlying problem, animations tend to obscure the causal relationships and make it harder for user to build a correct mental model.

I see where you're coming from: animations are overused and even when they make sense they are made too slow and flashy (because otherwise how would the implementors feel like they did something if it's barely noticeable?)

Animations are like bass in music: most people notice them only when they're missing or bad.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#183

Post by 6510 »

nashashmi wrote: post #138
troad wrote: post #55

Plain HTML is very cozy to me - I came of age in that era. Marquee tags 4eva . But as much as I hate to admit it, it is very difficult to build something functional today with plain HTML and no/minimal JS. If you want, say, a model form that manages its children as well, you're basically going to end up with a 2003-era ASP-feeling application with way too many views and forms (as seen on your employer's current HR sy…

OT: marquee tags were a missed opportunity to implement horizontal scrolling often used on shopping websites. Now it uses JS to achieve the same. I have been trying to find other more commonly known UI patterns that could be done natively. The time has long come for tabular data to be put into HTML tables just by referencing the source. Xslt almost did that. Another one is integrating xml http requests with native ht…

Sounds great Then have it generate actual html so that you can target th's, tr's and td's with css.

I believe the lowest hanging fruit would be

I think formData should also be available as interactive JSON but perhaps it is possible to also populate a form with fields from a json with something like:
Where mydata.json is:

   {"foo" : "bar", "baz" : "42"}
And have something like this come out:

   
     
       foo
       
     
     
       baz
It wouldn't cover everything but it is very nice not to have the later if you don't really need it.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#184

Post by [deleted] »

WickyNilliams wrote: post #166
eleventen wrote: post #8

The details / summary thing absolutely kills me. There’s basically nothing you can’t do with them. Hiding and replacing markers is easy. But every component library just pretends they don’t exist. It even saves you the effort of all the aria control and expanded tags: these tags don’t need them.

One drawback of details was that cmd+f search wouldn't play nicely when the details was closed. But now there's a hidden="until-found" you can put on child content, along with an associated event. So you can open the details when a user searches :) super useful

[deleted]

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#185

Post by 6510 »

ksec wrote: post #67
overflowy wrote: post #22

HTML and JavaScript serve distinct purposes, making better or worse comparisons logically flawed. Complex/interactive web apps requires JavaScript, period. Attempting to build sophisticated apps solely through HTML (looking at you HTMLX) eventually hits a functional ceiling.

I dont think anyone is arguing Google Earth should be pure HTML. But it is equally false you cant do Gmail with HTML only. There are things that HTML could do, and should be doing, that is not done or not yet possible simply due to hype and trend from browser vendors. We could continue to polish HTML + sprinkle of Javascript to its absolute maximum before hitting JS Apps. Right now this is far from the case.

Actually, I do think that. Wouldn't it be lovely to have an image format for truly enormous images and have the browser request only the chunk currently visible? It could just be a container format with jpg's in it. Let the file system figure out that x/y means tile number 56436.

You could provide multiple image versions for zooming to get to the TB scale.

Computers are really good, performance is astonishing, no reason why we should never be able to use a TB size image. Never is a really long time.

Have epic panoramas, detailed scans from paintings, extremely easy game design and maps that just work.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#186

Post by tapirl »

eleventen wrote: post #8

The details / summary thing absolutely kills me. There’s basically nothing you can’t do with them. Hiding and replacing markers is easy. But every component library just pretends they don’t exist. It even saves you the effort of all the aria control and expanded tags: these tags don’t need them.

The details / summary feature can also be implemented with pure css without JavaScript. Here is an example: https://docs.go101.org/std/pkg/io.html, just click all "+" signs to expand contents.

We can also use pure css to implement tab panels. A demo: http://tmd.tapirgames.com/demos.html#section-demo-4

Modern css is powerful.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#187

Post by ilaksh »

montroser wrote: post #32

Most of this is great, except for the input/datalist bits, which are not sufficiently functional to be used in any real scenario. Users expect these interfaces to be tolerant of misspellings, optional sub text under each option, mobile ux niceties, etc -- and so everyone builds this with js...

On my android phone it just didn't show anything in the drop downs.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#188

Post by 6510 »

hollowturtle wrote: post #122

I don't want to be so negative, but we got details and popover after literally decades, and we still have datalist presented as a plausible option? Html is so underdeveloped and the first we all agree on that the first we'll pretend from committee real advancement

The committee is an unsolved puzzle as old as mankind. That's not to discourage you. If you do solve it it would remedy almost all of our problems. If the solution could be found instantly in 5 seconds someone would have solved it already. This one is going to take some actual thinking and modeling.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#189

Post by jakelazaroff »

port11 wrote: post #178
jakelazaroff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is no longer true! You can do it in CSS with a combination of `@starting-style` and `transition-behavior: allow-discrete`. [1] Another gotcha you'll run into is animating the height. A couple other new features (`interpolate-size: allow-keywords` and `::details-content`) will let you get around that. [2] Modern CSS is awesome. [1] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/entry-exit-animations [2] https://nerdy.dev/open…

The major issue with this is that modern CSS is almost its own job, to the point we used to have Interface Developers at some place I’ve worked (HTML+CSS specialists). I did frontend for over a decade and eventually lost the train on CSS changes, I don’t even know what’s going on there anymore. It’s still awesome, but it’s becoming increasingly silly to ask someone to know modern HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Typescript, so…

When I started dabbling in web development, writing HTML and CSS was already its own job, and professional JavaScript developers basically did not exist. This was before TypeScript, before Node, before Ajax, before React or even jQuery. If anything has exploded in complexity in the intervening years, it's the JavaScript part of the equation.

I agree that it's increasingly silly to ask someone to be an expert in all of frontend. But the primary driver of that is not all the new CSS features we're getting.

Re: Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

#190

Post by xorcist »

tapirl wrote: post #186
eleventen wrote: post #8

The details / summary thing absolutely kills me. There’s basically nothing you can’t do with them. Hiding and replacing markers is easy. But every component library just pretends they don’t exist. It even saves you the effort of all the aria control and expanded tags: these tags don’t need them.

The details / summary feature can also be implemented with pure css without JavaScript. Here is an example: https://docs.go101.org/std/pkg/io.html , just click all "+" signs to expand contents. We can also use pure css to implement tab panels. A demo: http://tmd.tapirgames.com/demos.html#section-demo-4 Modern css is powerful.

What is a good reference to learn modern CSS? I seems most books and online resources are quickly outdated.
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