I tried to pass the page through Claude/ChatGPT to ask questions about the article. The AI hostility is real! This is the first time I’ve seen an instruction to AI in a web page that asks AI not to summarise.
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If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
71–80 of 144 posts
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Would have anyone advocated a Rust rewrite of Bun before?
That’s hardly a “tech hope” or “visionary”. Dirigibles continue to be interesting and fascinating to new generations, even if just as a concept; the language used to write a JavaScript runtime is uninteresting and unimportant in the scheme of things.
> The community would have frowned upon the idea, saying the effor would never be worth it. And now here we are.
Here we are where? Is the Rust release out yet? Didn’t it have tens of thousands of `unsafe` blocks? What’s so great about it? At this point in time, even implying the transition was a success is the same as calling the Hindenburg or the Titanic a success. You’ve seen the thing exists but have no idea how it’ll perform in the real world under real scrutiny and real scenarios. Perhaps that wouldn’t matter had much of Bun was just an internal project used by just one company, but it isn’t.
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#73Amazing 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.
My LLMs seem to grasp for React when I just ask for a simple webpage to display something simple. Its infuriating
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A nail, from what I hear about that side of things, but on the Apple side I could substitute the dual replacement of UIKit and AppKit with SwiftUI that somehow still isn't good, plus separate pressure coming from all the cross-platform options between iOS and Android.
At this point, I think HTML+JS is able to be a better choice than SwiftUI for most things: Yes, some stuff will still need to go to a native layer, but that's true for HTML as well. ;P
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#75I 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…
Isn't that alternate reality the current reality? For whatever reason, developers and some users expect an app to look the same across all platforms, while also looking distinct from other apps—otherwise, the app looks indistinguishable from a low effort one. This involves creating a design system and departing from each operating system's native widgets.
I'm not sure you're actually describing user's expectations, I think you're describing an oft-held belief about user's expectations among people who fancy themselves UX designers.
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#76I tried to pass the page through Claude/ChatGPT to ask questions about the article. The AI hostility is real! This is the first time I’ve seen an instruction to AI in a web page that asks AI not to summarise.
Did that actually work.
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Loo…
> My impression is, all browsers are holding back on everything HTML-native and JavaScript-free.
Somewhat tangentially, the official response to a request for WebAuthn without JavaScript[1] was that the big websites don’t care and thus neither do the browsers.
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#78Earlier 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…
>In a couple years you can show a judge that a free LLM screen reader could have solved their access issues
It seems like it'd be equally trivial to demonstrate that said reader doesn't work on some combination of hardware and software.
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Better garbage collection than current runtimes? Now this is surely rose tinted glasses, probably based on nostalgia. It had horrific performance all around. Even the now obsolete Opera browser Kestrel runtime had better JS performance, and it is obsolete because Chrome crushed it in benchmarks consistently for several years. No, there's no way Flash had the performance characteristics you mention, even less in a cri…
People have this odd view that Flash had horrific performance, largely because their encounters with it as users were mostly with ads and graphics on the web that were terribly written and soaked up a lot of CPU. The same is true for tons of Javascript junk that pollutes the web now, but no one blames the language or the interpreter for that. AS3 ran inside a VM, so garbage collection wasn't linked to the browser's needs the way an embedded JS engine's would be (although it could take hints from the browser, as I recall). But the GC was excellent if code was properly written, and that meant a lot of good practices like ensuring weak references in event listeners and destroying / tearing down instances. You had to write code in a way that the GC would know to mark and sweep. Having said that, I tested a 500,000 line, single bullet Flash gaming site running on a beta version of the Flash plugin for iOS/Safari in 2012, on an iPhone 5, that was running particle systems and multiple game animations on screen with performance that would almost rival a javascript-based game now on phones that are 15 generations improved. If written well, and with a good understanding of how it managed memory, and keeping in mind what you had up on the GPU, from about 2012-2015 you could make the AS3 VM perform about as well or better than a reasonable graphics stack like PixiJS performs in 2026, on much lesser hardware. And you could definitely avoid memory leaks if you took care to.
Re: If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe
#80Amazing 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.
Looks like Apple are making an effort to get agents to create decent code with Xcode skills, which someone has extracted here [1] but there is near zero mention of accessibility. Worth a read though I think, I learned a few things.