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Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

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Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#101

Post by contravariant »

cuddlecake wrote: post #15
mosselman wrote: post #10

I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.

Sounds weird if you phrase it in a weird way, yes. Just like communicating with strangers via on-demand electric currents is weird as well, if you phrase it like that.

Not to mention how weird speech is if you try to explain it to in a similar manner.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#102

Post by jedieaston »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #45

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable,…

>(dates this)

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/...

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#103

Post by justaguyhere »

TekMol wrote: post #27

This website uses scatterplots instead of lists to display products: https://www.productchart.com So on Product Chart, you can for example say "Show me 300 smartphones and put the price on the x-axis and the size on the y-axis". It's a bit like you would lay out things on a table and then organize them by some criteria.

Looks really nice! Wouldn't a simple table be a better option in this case though? I quickly got tired hovering over each icon (very small icons too) to look at the specs.

Looks very nice though.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#105

Post by nvarsj »

ransom1538 wrote: post #100

Craigslist. Here is something novel: let html and browsers do their job. Let your browser process simple html at light speed. Let GET be idempotent. Let users be anonymous while getting information.

But then what will your rockstar engineers do?

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#106

Post by breakerbox »

itronitron wrote: post #81
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #68

This is more of a joke answer, but r/ProgrammerHumour recently underwent a spate of submissions competing to come up with the wackiest and "wrong" ways to do common UI elements, such as the slider or phone number inputs. A small album of the best and worst of these submissions: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6fdl8h/an_...

I'm surprised no one has created a VAAS Volume as a Service

That's a great start up idea - Cloud based UI elements.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#107

Post by superkuh »

For the comment system on my website I wrote a perl script that tails the nginx logs for all instances of /@say/ in the file path of requests. Anything after a /@say/ is considered comment. So the UI for commenting on my website is like,

http://mywebsite.com/somepage.html/@say/Hey, neat somepage content, guy.

Some nginx redirects also included to take users to the comments page after submitting.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#108

Post by Angostura »

harry-wood wrote: post #37
atoav wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thinking about this weirdness a lot. In my book communicating via electric currents while seeming weird, isn't because of it's pure practicality. Digitizing these currents instead of transmiting an analog signal seems weird, but isn't because it allows faster, errorfree and more diverse communications etc. You can go on and follow the technical developement, but you will inevitably reach a point where peo…

> "In my book..." As I was reading, for a second there I thought you'd actually written a book called "Communicating via electric currents seems weird". Sounds amazing! Where can I buy this book??

I parsed the book name as 'Communicating via electric currents' then my brain threw an exception.

Re: Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

#109

Post by boomlinde »

cuddlecake wrote: post #15
mosselman wrote: post #10

I've heard that some people build UIs with thousands of dependencies, in JavaScript that hits the server for text that is then parsed to object that are then passed through all sorts of classes that each spit out HTML. They also do some weird stuff with events like key-ups in order to re-render input fields based on objects rather than letting the browser manage those kinds of things. Sounds pretty weird to me.

Sounds weird if you phrase it in a weird way, yes. Just like communicating with strangers via on-demand electric currents is weird as well, if you phrase it like that.

Well, I can think of good reasons for communicating using electricity. It's fast. The infrastructure is available. I can think of good reasons to communicate with strangers. It's interesting, strangers are interesting.

I can't think of a good reason for depending on thousands of libraries to aid you in laying out and presenting a document, if you are using a language and a platform specifically designed for that purpose.

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