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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

#121

Post by NoGravitas »

bluedino wrote: post #99
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...

Oh gods, you reminded me of the existence of Borland buttons.

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

#122

Post by socalgal2 »

goatlover wrote: post #120
socalgal2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Resizing (scaling) isn't the point. It's re-layout that's the point.

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

#123

Post by socalgal2 »

hs586 wrote: 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 surprising how relatively recent shirt buttons are. 1000s of years no one thought (or couldn't?) sew a hole and put button through it.

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

#124

Post by socalgal2 »

Interestingly the code on the page doesn't work. onmouseup and onpointerup are the wrong event for a button because the button should only send an "clicked" event if the user pressed DOWN on the button, then released while still on the button. The example code though will send an event even if the user started off the button.

I think that emphasizes the point though. You need more code to do it correctly.

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

#125

Post by panny »

chuckadams wrote: post #20
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.

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…

>The main problem is there isn't a standard "combobox" at all to speak of

But there is. You'll be so happy to learn about datalist today,

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml5_d...

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

#126

Post by panny »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #77
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 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. [1] https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/1255

Surveillance capitalism LOVES javascript.

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

#127

Post by noduerme »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #118
noduerme wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, Electron is bloated, period. You can do your best with it, but there's a level of fundamental bloat and slow performance that's inherent to how it works. And bad code is bad code. Any platform can be used to write bad code, but the more accessible the development process is for newbie coders or non-coders, the more likely you are to get a lot of poorly performing apps, which is why there were a lot of those in Flash.

So I do understand why it got that reputation. But I'm using Javascript's raw performance in 2012 as an objective point of comparison. Consider a browser game. Given well-written JS coded with a competent understanding of the engine architecture versus well-written Flash, rendering the exact same animations, effects and interactions, you would find that the framerate in Flash could stay 25-30 fps on an iPhone 5, and be What did make the dev process in Flash truly accessible was that it allowed the artists' pipeline to work in the same environment as the coders'. That did sometimes give rise to poorly written apps, but the fact is that the same thing in JS would have been even slower and more battery-draining, in an apples-to-apples comparison.

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

#128

Post by aaronrobinson »

tagyro wrote: post #85
aaronrobinson wrote: post #63

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.

And why is that a problem? Their website, their content, their choice.

I didn’t suggest it was a problem?

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

#129

Post by CrimsonRain »

dataflow wrote: post #114
CrimsonRain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A. Any decent ones are more than good enough to provide content in an accessible way.

B. Like you accept the risk of running scripts? Or getting zero day thru your browser? Ridiculous. Sandbox it.

C. Local LLM is enough. Nothing needs to go to a server.

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

#130

Post by CrimsonRain »

tempfile wrote: post #50
CrimsonRain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Does it count if you have to pay for a service for something to be made accessible? I'm sure a blind person nowadays could hire an assistant to use their computer for them, but that would not be reasonable.

So the whole world needs to pay (spend more) to accommodate to your problem? What next? You don't have legs so everyone around you must carry you?

Look, the goal is not to make things accessible. The goal is, out of generosity of the society (and I fully support it), to allow disabled people to access the services. Before recent times, it was only meaningfully possible thru building accessible friendly websites/apps.

This has always been a hit and miss. Usually only the super big companies did it right (see Google apple Ms) or people using big company's framework with some carefulness. But for the most, it didn't work out. That's why so much complaint against websites being inaccessible.

Now we have a better way. Use a local AI to consume or interact with the content. This will empower the disabled far more than they currently are. Apple will probably lead the way here.

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