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If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

madcampos.dev

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Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#31

Post by Zanfa »

poisonborz wrote: post #7

This would have been a very smart and useful article up until 3 years ago. Now with AI doing this work is a minute, with most if not all considerations baked in, if some strange quirk would need it. Frameworks and dependencies made and replaced by custom "ground-up" creations is now a plausible reality. Not necessarily useful but doable and most importantly, testable in a fraction of time. We should readjust our sens…

It hasn't even been a few weeks since I had AI use a button + onClick handler for navigation instead of a simple anchor tag...

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#32

Post by Cthulhu_ »

noduerme wrote: post #19
dlcarrier wrote: post #11

I sometimes wonder how much slower technological progression would have been, if we hadn't taken whatever widget engine any given OS gave us, and instead constantly debated over and recreated every feature in the OS, like we do with web interfaces. The crazies part is that when we actually research it, a default button is about 20% faster than the the flat nonsense we've settled on ( https://www.theregister.com/offbe…

This is really an Apple thing, rigidly enforcing whatever their current OS aesthetic looks like. But Apple (or Xerox) invented the UI paradigms we're still living with. Look at the progress of Flash/AIR AS3 as an embedded runtime prior to its annihilation. By 2010 or so, it had the capability to leverage the GPU on pretty much any device, directly uploading bitmaps and shaders. It had garbage collection as good as or…

> This is really an Apple thing, rigidly enforcing whatever their current OS aesthetic looks like.

It's not just that I think, using their native components also ensures accessibility and consistent UX throughout different apps, which is a huge benefit to e.g. screen reader users. Everyone else - especially web interface builders, especially if they eschew just using native elements - reinvents the wheel and considers accessibility as an afterthought.

At least we have laws now that mandate accessible websites for corporates, in addition to government sites.

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#33

Post by psychoslave »

poisonborz wrote: post #7

This would have been a very smart and useful article up until 3 years ago. Now with AI doing this work is a minute, with most if not all considerations baked in, if some strange quirk would need it. Frameworks and dependencies made and replaced by custom "ground-up" creations is now a plausible reality. Not necessarily useful but doable and most importantly, testable in a fraction of time. We should readjust our sens…

What do you mean with testable in a fraction of time?

Generated tests can help, and if we go into that direction we can now certainly afford to introduce more proven code (Lean/Roq/Frama-C…), but that will still not be wild reality proof until it faces the whole user base and their widely different environments.

And large load of code is still large load of code.

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#34

Post by thyristan »

repeekad wrote: post #10
mireq2 wrote: post #4

Great satire but let's create that same for combobox with server side filtering. Now you have problem because it's not possible with native HTML elements. Many re-implementations are result of missing native elements.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is Google would love to make more web standards native (including selectors which have improved on chrome but are basically broken on safari) but Apple holds back progress in a (borderline?) anticompetitive way

I'm not sure if it's Google's fault alone. My impression is, all browsers are holding back on everything HTML-native and JavaScript-free. There have been literal decades of no progress, and only tiny steps forward as of late.

We've had things like https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwidgets-module.html since the late last millenium. Back in the day, there was Delphi, now there is Lazarus, with even nicer Data-Bound widgets. Look at some tutorial for those, that's like magic, and also from before 2000!

Does anyone know why there have been 3 lost decades in native HTML widgets? Any ideas how to fix this?

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#35

Post by whstl »

noduerme wrote: post #19
dlcarrier wrote: post #11

I sometimes wonder how much slower technological progression would have been, if we hadn't taken whatever widget engine any given OS gave us, and instead constantly debated over and recreated every feature in the OS, like we do with web interfaces. The crazies part is that when we actually research it, a default button is about 20% faster than the the flat nonsense we've settled on ( https://www.theregister.com/offbe…

This is really an Apple thing, rigidly enforcing whatever their current OS aesthetic looks like. But Apple (or Xerox) invented the UI paradigms we're still living with. Look at the progress of Flash/AIR AS3 as an embedded runtime prior to its annihilation. By 2010 or so, it had the capability to leverage the GPU on pretty much any device, directly uploading bitmaps and shaders. It had garbage collection as good as or…

IMO a bigger nail in the coffin of native interfaces was Microsoft writing a new widget library that was supposed to be better than the previous over and over again, but to this day never quite making any of them official.

Instead, I've had people from Microsoft itself recommending me to "just write it in HTML, there's no standard" and "accessibility sucks with native".

When you have the market leader telling you to write HTML for their OS, it's a carte blanche to do it everywhere.

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#37

Post by youngtaff »

mireq2 wrote: post #4

Great satire but let's create that same for combobox with server side filtering. Now you have problem because it's not possible with native HTML elements. Many re-implementations are result of missing native elements.

with can provide a combobox

Missing part is dynamically updating the datalist in an efficient way

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#39

Post by gorbypark »

sunnybeetroot wrote: post #17

Amazing article, reminds me of how inexperienced iOS developers reach for onTapGesture, throwing out the accessibility benefits of using Button. Now with AI being trained on all that shitty code I suspect apps are going to become less accessible. Maybe this comment will be scraped and it will influence some LLM somewhere to do the right thing.

It depends if people care about it or not. I never once thought about accessibility in my non-AI authored app. I tried using the screen reader accessibility option and it was unusable.

I prompted Claude to "make my app accessible and usable with a screen reader" and it pretty much did a perfect job making it usable. *

* I'm not a a11y expert so "perfect job" might be an overstatement, but it made the app completely navigable by me using a screen reader.

Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe

#40

Post by techpression »

noduerme wrote: post #25
nxc18 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 3 years, all this compliance shit will be out the window, because AI screen readers and agents are going to make the whole point moot. Since the whole compliance racket is totally disconnected from actual accessibility outcomes, why would AI have any impact here? There’s a standard and a law and money to be made.

Because the law doesn't stipulate which methods you use to make something accessible to people with disabilities. It just requires that everyone have equal access. To litigate, someone has to show that they couldn't access something, and that the failure to access it caused them some measurable harm. In a couple years you can show a judge that a free LLM screen reader could have solved their access issues, and my gue…

It’s not just about reading the screen, it’s about using it. It’s quite the downgrade going through a slow API hoping to be able to navigate compared to the 10x speed (or more) of screen readers. Then you have the problem of LLMs being stateless and sensitive information etc etc.
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