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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

#111

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. Two, it was not responsive. It was written for fixed sizes with keyboards and mice. Not portrait displays with touch screens, nor AR/VR displays with pointers/hands, and for resolutions of the day, not reflowing / resizing to fit the user's device

Responsiveness is overrated. I use a phone with one hand (unless typing). I use a tablet with two hands (unless on a stand), and I use my PC with a mouse and keyboard. The biggest benefits for me is when the developer think about the layout and specific widgets for each type of device and not merely reflow them.

Something like procreate would be horrible with mouse/keyboard. UX is not merely a function of size.

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

#112
post #101

Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?

It's hard to say if we ever would. We used up a lot of the very easy to access sources of many resources - minerals, oil, etc.

Without having access to the advanced techniques, I think it's unlikely we'd even reach the industrial revolution again.

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

#113
post #101

Before opening the article, I thought it's about a shirt buttons and it reminded me one of my favourite thought experiments: Imagine everything man-made suddenly disappears but not the knowledge individuals carry. How long until we have an iPhone (or a plastic shirt button)? Would it even be any faster than the first time around?

Almost certainly. I can go out into the woods behind my house and get into the iron age in a few days (most of that time would be waiting for clay to dry and charcoal pits to cool). That cuts out ~300k years of anatomically modern human history. Whether or not it would be possible to bootstrap the industrial revolution without easily accessible coal and petroleum is a bigger question.

We might lose electricity for a while. There's not a lot of utility for electricity in pre-industrial society. Like, given enough copper, I could make a wind turbine, but I can't casually make a useful lightbulb. Maybe a ceiling fan, but it would almost certainly be easier to run that off of mechanical power directly via a series of gears and belts. Electrochemistry would be a neat party trick, but I don't think my shoddily built wind turbine would generate enough juice to process aluminum.

Firearms would probably continue to exist. I could make a musket, and its utility for hunting and defense would make it immediately worth it. Black powder's not terribly difficult to manufacture from base ingredients.

Are we including domesticated crops as "man-made"? Because that would complicate matters. A lot of knowledge could be lost in the time it takes to rebreed the kinds of grains that allow for stable settlement.

We wouldn't need to re-invent writing, since that's just knowledge, and that would give a pretty big leg up in not losing a bunch of knowledge every time someone dies.

On the whole, if we keep selectively bred crops, I'd say we'd be bumped back to about the Middle Ages at the most. If we're losing the crops, then it would come down to whether we could preserve our more advanced knowledge long enough for agriculture to redevelop.

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

#114

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…

Excellent response. I said it before, forcing the responsibility of making thing accessible on the world makes no sense now (made sense before though). Just use an AI to interact with the app/website; it can provide whatever sort of accessibility you need. It should be built as a chrome extension or even native...

> Just use an AI

You mean like (a) assume this perfect AI that already exists never makes a mistake because AI doesn't do that, (b) accept all the security risks like prompt injection, (c) accept the fact that you don't deserve to enjoy the same privacy over your life as others do?

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

#115
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only browser Apple is blocking it on is Safari: other browsers implement it just fine, and the standard passed over Apple's objections. The rationale was architectural, arguing that extending built-in components would lead either to brittle components that would break when new properties were added or causing the specification of builtin components to freeze forever to avoid such breakage. I'm not sure I buy the…

This is sort of correct on webkits side. inheritance chains especially when you don't control who is inheriting from you are going to be very brittle. The standard would probably have been better if it had been specified as a form of composition instead. However not supporting something like this is largely worse than just doing the inheritance. I'm not sure this is a hill I would die on despite largely agreeing with…

That's my take on it too. The DOM itself is full of issues from its naive inheritance-happy OO design, and could use a refresh into something with better separation between data and presentation, but it's what we have right now in the real world. There's always going to be footguns, we can't put safeties on all of them. I have to wonder if it's something in the design of WebKit that makes inheritance particularly difficult to implement.

As for potential property collisions, I think the common wisdom is to just ensure the property name contains a dash, since the html5 spec goes out of its way to avoid using them. Doesn't solve brittle inheritance hierarchies in general, but it does at least stay out of the way of built-in behavior.

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

#116
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…

Flash had horrific security and accessibility, along with Adobe just being a suck company in general. When you couple that with browser integration issues it just becomes a stack of issues that people became tired with in general.

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

#117
post #62

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…

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.

The industry couldn't decide what it wanted for a long time (and maybe still hasn't settled). Pages needed to be consistent visually no matter which platform and browser the page was displayed on (which is odd, few people used the same sites on multiple platforms at the time). Oh, but then it was visually jarring because it didn't match the rest of the platform and you couldn't leverage your knowledge and experience of the platform's UI (the way multi-select worked in drop downs, accessibility). But then you couldn't style the widgets on the page to make your site distinct (styling OSX "lickable candy" widgets didn't work so well since they were so visually unique). And then you had mobile where space is a premium and scrollbars were sometimes visually hidden and the entire application took up the whole screen, so differences from other sites and the platforms as a whole were not as prominent. So all widgets had to be stylable (IIRC, you could style buttons but not scrollbars for a while, which made things inconsistent within a given page itself). And complete control of the "experience" became desirable, the scrollbar was seen as part of the page, not part of the container that holds and displays the page.

Ultimately the browser was recognized as its own platform and had to support all the customizations and accessibility concerns. User stylesheets are a thing, but few used that for much more than hiding annoying elements, and today the most likely user customizable thing is being able to switch between light and dark modes.

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

#118
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…

It's interesting to me whenever developers say "actually this framework/language/library/platform that's popular and lauded for how accessible it makes development has great performance as long as you dig into the architecture and write code skillfully" because the broad consensus among users is that they will not.

As a user, comparitive "performance" is about the code people actually write, and even more on the code that I'm most likely to interact with. I don't actually care whether or not the code could be faster if it was written better, because it always could, and it never is. When people say "Electron is slow and bloated" they don't mean that exhaustively written Electron apps could never" be performant, they mean that apps that use Electron tend to be slow and bloated. The way to change that reputation is not to argue that Electron could* be fast if people held it right, but to make it easier and more natural for Electron apps to be faster than they currently are.

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

#120

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. Two, it was not responsive. It was written for fixed sizes with keyboards and mice. Not portrait displays with touch screens, nor AR/VR displays with pointers/hands, and for resolutions of the day, not reflowing / resizing to fit the user's device

Flash generated SVGs so it could be resized to any screen.
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