I am a bit confused here. What is the difference between Dart and Angular, and this initiative? I hope this does not sound as a dumb question.
I am asking this because people here are comparing it to Twitter Bootstrap.
Web Starter Kit
191–200 of 218 posts
Re: Web Starter Kit
#192Is it just me, or do the fonts on that page look terrible on Windows? /edit: looks like it's just "Roboto Condensed"
No it's not just you, it's everyone using chrome windows, it a bug in their rendering engine that has been unfixed for years. There are multiple easy ways to fix this (load order, re-rendering font, server config)..you would think a web starter kit would get the basics of fonts right... The layout is also broken for the icon rows... Example: http://i.imgur.com/8DCIsLw.jpg
It's not a bug, it's just how GDI ClearType renders text. It doesn't perform y-axis antialiasing so almost-horizontal curves look blocky. The solution is to use DirectWrite but Chrome hasn't made the jump yet.
Re: Web Starter Kit
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed and I don't understand why many other developers poo poo web applications vs native. For example we have a web app that syncs audio on any device running safari or chrome. When we demo/ turn a crowd and their devices into a stereo..we just ask them to go to X URL. They load it up in their device and the host hits play. The audience is not forced to download an app and do a few other steps. It's just load URL a…
> The audience is not forced to download an app and do a few other steps. It's just load URL and bam everyone's devices become a stereo. Many other ideas in this space can occur. The same thing could happen with any sandboxed platform that allows code download from an internet resource -- even Java did it more than a decade ago (WebStart I think it was called). For some reason (traction I guess) we did it through pil…
Cross platform GUI widgets were possibly a good idea seven years ago if you didn't care about looking too good on OS X (still today, Qt applications look somewhat off on that platform). Today, they are a terrible idea, because every mobile platform looks different and if you try to make one interface for all, it will feel non-native on every one. At least if you use completely custom widgets, as HTML forces you to, it will be clearly non-native, not something pretending to be native but with the wrong behaviors.
I'm sure many people fundamentally want programming to be as close to write-once-run-anywhere as possible, and hence think this is a terrible state of affairs; for me, though, having different platforms with different, clear design philosophies is a good thing as it encourages people to care about and innovate in design.
Re: Web Starter Kit
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're throwing out HTML/CSS why on earth would you keep Javascript? (or also contentiously - HTTP) If we're throwing away the cruft (which I fully support!), lets do things right. That means planning a (light) abstraction layer for a world where you can use the right tool for the job.
Javascript is not the problem (though I think we would all be better off with more variety like NaCl would have provided). I'm actually starting to wonder if an approach like docker/lxc, but with web features ported to native land may not end up making more sense in the long term. The idea would be to take all the features of the web that aren't document focused and make them available in userland in a linux containe…
> It may be easier to take the web to sandboxed containers
http://httplocal.com/ is working on local composition of web pipelines. Micro Xen (Bromium) forks a virtual machine with a fresh copy of the host operating system and browser for every URI.
What do you think of iOS8 extensions and Android intents? Or https://sandstorm.io ? The challenge is maintaining security and composition flexibility. Apple only opened up a few APIs.
Re: Web Starter Kit
#195The web is now hamstrung by the HTML/CSS layout model more than anything else. The hackery required to attempt to imitate native mobile apps is horrific. Google would be better off throwing efforts into a new layout engine leveraging raw JS and WebGL, but with a sane API, than these continuous attempts to push HTML into places where it doesn't work. If they don't lead it I can see someone else doing it in such a way…
I disagree, HTML/CSS have come a long ways in the past few years, in terms of browser compatibility and features. I don't see how introducing a new layout engine would help. That's just another standard that every platform has to support. Using WebGL would be great, but so far WebGL support on mobile is not great. If you haven't worked with web tools recently you should see how far they've come. With JS frameworks li…
> If you haven't worked with web tools recently you should
> see how far they've come.
Re: Web Starter Kit
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> After a little practice, it can even get easy. Just googling for "vertical align text css" should be enough to tell you that different layout is needed. Why shouldn't there be a layout model that makes it easy to do the things people are trying to do? The idea that we shouldn't even attempt to create a better one is silly.
I think the problem comes from a lack of understand of the complexity of such a task. Vertical align text according to what? The easiest way to vertical align text is exactly how you'd expect it to be, and it solves the problem perfectly. If you want to align text vertically, you just do font-size: 20px; line-height: 40px; vertical-align: middle; What's the problem?
.. and then, when the content is wrapped over two lines you get a line-height that you set just to vertical align the text. Perfect? No :-)
Re: Web Starter Kit
#197I am a bit confused here. What is the difference between Dart and Angular, and this initiative? I hope this does not sound as a dumb question. I am asking this because people here are comparing it to Twitter Bootstrap.
Dart is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript. The project also encompasses APIs like collections, async and a much improved DOM API. Dart also has a node.js-like server VM with IO.
Angular is a client-side web framework that provides templating and data-binding. It was originally written in JavaScript, and now has a Dart port as well.
Somewhat relatedly, Google and Mozilla have been working on the web components standards, which bring some of the features Angular popularized, and some more fundamental ones as well, natively into the browser. These include Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, Mutation Observers, Object.observe(), and HTML Imports.
Polymer is a project that helps with building custom elements, it adds some sugar including templating and data-binding, similar to Angular in some ways, but completely focused on modern Web Components related standards, and on elements - not apps or frameworks. You can use Polymer elements in any app with any framework, or without a framework.
Web Starter Kit looks like a bundle tools to help you build a site with modern best practices, like responsive layouts, a local dev server, a build system, mobile-friendly user input, multi-device testing, etc.
Web Starter Kit looks like it's framework agnostic, so you could probably use Angular or other frameworks to fill in the views, though these days you might find you don't really need a framework if you're using Web Components.
Re: Web Starter Kit
#198I am a bit confused here. What is the difference between Dart and Angular, and this initiative? I hope this does not sound as a dumb question. I am asking this because people here are comparing it to Twitter Bootstrap.
Dart is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript. The project also encompasses APIs like collections, async and a much improved DOM API. Dart also has a node.js-like server VM with IO. Angular is a client-side web framework that provides templating and data-binding. It was originally written in JavaScript, and now has a Dart port as well. Somewhat relatedly, Google and Mozilla have been working on the web c…
That's a comprehensive explanation, thanks!
Re: Web Starter Kit
#199Why does this need to depend on Ruby as well as node.js? As a starter kit shouldn't it aim for the least dependencies to get started? So for devs who want to use this with another web framework like Python, They need to have node, Ruby and Python installed? Node is extremely easy to deploy/install that's even self-hostable where you can even check in node.exe (e.g. on Windows) into the repo so no prior installation i…
Ruby is a dependency for SASS, that'd be the only reason
There is libsass and sassc https://github.com/sass/sassc
It works for a fairly large project i'm involved in.
Besides being AFAIU significantly faster then the ruby one, it allowed me to continue to refuse to add another scripting environment to our already mile long dependency list.
Re: Web Starter Kit
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Browser lock-in? What makes you think web applications made with this kit work only in Chrome?
I don't think he means locked into a single browser, I think he miiiight mean "generally locked into using a computer at the level of a browser vs. at the level of the OS." As in, "your mom and uncle will buy a web-browser, they won't buy a computer." Correct me if I'm wrong :)
I don't think so. This is the sentence he replied to:
"The only plus I see in all this is that in the end we are now free of the API lock-in that OS vendors traditionally required"
The discussion here is about APIs that are specific to Apple, Microsoft, Google etc.