If you want to create a button from scratch, you must first create the universe • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by noduerme » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 9:06 AM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #106

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. 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

This is absolutely false. Stage resizing and browser hooks for window resize were fundamental in Flash. (only in Chrome after 2017 did those events stop being delivered until after the window resize finished; prior to that they were delivered per frame). For complex Flex/Flash/AIR apps, layouts could be animated into new positions on the fly at 60fps as windows resized. I wrote three completely separate game platforms in AS3, and a full web CMS platform with dozens of widgets, and a file system manager, with interfaces that were as responsive as what you'd get from modern css. In many ways, creating responsive grids with proper text and image reflow was much easier, especially if you wanted something to "break the grid" on certain layout sizes. This was at a time when float:left was the HTML standard for wrapping text around an image block. In Flash you could define sizes and a vector line for text to runaround an image. The text handling for responsive resize and layout was light years ahead of native browser text rendering. Multi-column text and drop caps existed first in Flash. Whole magazines were written in it. Speaking as a graphic designer as well as a coder, I think the JS SPA web is on the whole much less responsive than Flash SPAs were, because of the poor flex-and-grid paradigm we're currently saddled with. And it's visually far more constrained to as couple of @media queries.

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

#142

Post by krapp » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 9:24 AM UTC

SvenL wrote: post #64

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…

I guess the main issue is that HTML was supposed to be a language to describe documents. We abuse it to design interactive applications. I would rather like to not have one technology to support to different use cases. It’s a shame we are riding that abomination for developing apps.

An HTML document is also an interactive application - that's what hyperlinks and forms are. The script tag has been a part of HTML since the late 90s, the original intent was that it supported multiple scripting languages. The distinction between "app" and "document" is a modern ideological quirk, few sites are strictly one or the other.

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

#143

Post by tempfile » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 8:31 AM UTC

CrimsonRain wrote: post #130

tempfile wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> So the whole world needs to pay (spend more) to accommodate to your problem?

Yes.

> What next? You don't have legs so everyone around you must carry you?

Too stupid to engage with.

Obviously society has to accommodate (i.e. spend money for) people who are disabled or unable to interact with it due to inalienable features of their body. Anything other than that is just cruel.

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

#144

Post by mireq2 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:22 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #66

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.

If you use a custom select, update your , you should be good, shouldn't you? There are UI components that are not available in native browser controls (infuriatingly: some are only available in some browsers on some platforms), but even then you're better off writing a shim to replicate normal browser behaviour than ruining the experience for everyone because Firefox on Android doesn't have a colour picker.

No. I need something like Mars - separated internal representation and value and dynamically updated. If i can fit whole list to client memory why should i choose datalist over select?