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

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

#91

Post by thyristan »

sheept wrote: post #65
thyristan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 guess is that it takes time to research what universal behavior users expect from a component based on examples in existing software. It's universal, so it has to work with everyone: mouse, keyboard, touch; large monitors and tiny phones; screen readers; and users with motor difficulties. And existing components may not have even thought of all of these cases. For example, they've recently introduced the Interest…

There will always be the next big thing.

Maybe VR glasses will be big soon. Do we trigger on 'blink'? 'look harder'? 'eyeball wiggle'?

Maybe voice interfaces? Trigger on 'say it louder'? 'stuttering'? 'hesitant'?

Maybe guestures, facial expressions, thought patterns? 'think hard about that button to trigger tooltip'? 'furl your eyebrows'?

As I've said, decades have passed with no progress. If progress in other fields is a reason for waiting, it'll be stagnant forever and eventually just dead.

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

#92

Post by OptionOfT »

master-lincoln wrote: post #27
noduerme wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

> except for one: It was closed source. And it was a security nightmare...

IIRC Firefox was the first one to move extensions to a separate process so a hung/crashed extension wouldn't take down the whole browser.

That's when I learned about the halting problem.

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

#93

Post by Shorel »

noduerme wrote: post #79
Shorel wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I definitely blame JS whenever I have to interact with some websites or Electron applications :) Even coding agents. I made my own agent in d-lang just because I'm alergic to installing anything that requires node.js.

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

#94

Post by jatora »

poly2it wrote: post #88
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…

I can't take a design opinion seriously when it is hosted on a site as hideous as that.

agreed. horrible.

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

#95

Post by lelanthran »

noduerme wrote: post #12

Just coming off a wild ride where a client was sued by a non-customer and a rapacious legal firm, who claimed that said client's website was not sufficiently accessible. The day after the lawsuit was filed, a company specializing in accessibility testing mysteriously contacted the client, offering a solution. Client had not even gotten notice of the litigation yet. The net result of this was several tens of thousands…

> 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.

If that's the case, why didn't they spend a few bucks on Claude to do the accessibility changes?

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

#98

Post by whstl »

ben_w wrote: post #74
whstl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I agree. SwiftUI looks exactly the same mistake Microsoft made with MFC/WTL/VB6/WebForms/WPF/Silverlight/WinRT/UWP/WinUI/MAUI.

Is it a better interface and developer experience? For sure. Is it gonna replace the previous API? Doubtful.

I have to admit I'm still ignoring it though.

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

#99

Post by bluedino »

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…

In the earlier Windows days, Borland and a couple other companies did their own buttons etc

https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c5a0e280-a1c3-974a-24c2-90...

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

#100

Post by jgalt212 »

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…

Every once in a while, I do some rudimentary research on what problems the 100s of web UI frameworks are trying to solve versus the UI problems that were solved by Mac and Windows in the 1980s/90s. It's never been a satisfactory exercise.
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