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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

#51

Post by DanielHB »

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.

I think LLMs actually greatly improve accessibility, they are great about finding bad patterns in code.

You can literally run a "open this codebase and improve accessibility where you can" and get mostly perfectly good changes. Models and harnesses can be tuned to prioritize it by default, but usually the developer only needs to nudge it a bit to get good accessibility.

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

#52

Post by roundabout-host »

youngtaff wrote: post #37
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

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

#53

Post by troupo »

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

Not Google. Microsoft, of all companies started this project: https://open-ui.org/ when Google was busy breaking the web web components, hardware APis etc.

Google was very, very, very late to the project and of course immediately trampled all over it like they did with all the web standards.

Apple isn't holding back progress on that. They are all in on it, though they do tend to be more cautious than the "break fast and lose things" Google.

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

#54

Post by roundabout-host »

nxc18 wrote: post #21

Very slightly off topic but also on, I’ve noticed a tendency for well-meaning accessibility folks to drive to bad outcomes to meet some standard. Color is one where the standard is usually right, but there’s pretty strong evidence that the standard is bad in some cases. See APCA v WCAG. https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/WhyAPCA.html If you click any link on this page (to the author’s site) and you dare to us…

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

#55

Post by roundabout-host »

ozim wrote: post #22
leecommamichael wrote: post #15

I expected a blog on how to write a button using a graphics API and basic OS interface; but instead I completely mistook (what the comments are saying is) sarcasm as advice on how to program for the web. I'm not a web guy, so I'm not really even sure why this is sarcastic, isn't semantic web good? I can't keep up with the opinions.

Semantic web is good if you are making web documents not web applications. Have a type and: submit a form; reset a form; or not do anything with the related form. No one uses buttons to submit a form in web applications. You use buttons to start/stop/change interaction flow. Native browser controls are not workable in a modern web application. It is not that developers are lazy it is that you get requirements from bu…

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

#59

Post by chuckadams »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #48
chuckadams wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything doing server-side work is going to have to be at least somewhat custom. The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of: we're still mostly stuck with the same carved-in-stone widget set from Mosaic, whereas native toolkits were more inventive even in the late 80s. Where's Athena's 2d panner widget, for example? I didn't read any satire in the article at all, it just laid out all the…

I imagine the commenter was referring to the article title wrt satire.

Fair enough, I'd call it "homage" perhaps.

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

#60

Post by poisonborz »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #43
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…

> Now with AI doing this work is a minute ... Frameworks and dependencies made and replaced by custom "ground-up" creations is now a plausible reality. "You only have to want it and believe in it, then it will succeed." - Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin "The airship [is] the future of commercial air transport in general." - Dr. Hugo Eckener "The age of the airship is no longer a dream of the future; it is a reality of t…

There were hundreds of such misplaced tech hopes, and hundreds that did become true - all those "visionary" quotes of newspapers talking about video calling and remote libraries. Would have anyone advocated a Rust rewrite of Bun before? The community would have frowned upon the idea, saying the effor would never be worth it. And now here we are.

I'm not saying use custom html elements because we can. But if somehow a html button is a valid technical problem, it can be reasonably done well for the scope of that app.

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