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Don't Roll Your Own

susam.net

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#61

I'm always an "It Depends" kind of guy. I have a personal issue with having a 500KB page load, so a button press can be animated.

Ugh you triggered me.

I hate how most "modern" websites have MEGABYTES of JavaScript. CSS? Pack it in a js bundle with JSX and object literals. Images? Throw them in too, just make it load on demand.

Hell, just put a there and let js do the rest. It's not like we have browsers and networks and edge nodes optimized to render websites in other ways.

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#63

> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own text selection. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own copy and paste. browser should not even let the page see this action I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see…

> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it

Nope we haven’t. At least not in a web application. At least not since the days Infinite Scrolling was invented. IIRC Twitter, for eg, only renders a partial list depending on the scroll position.

I once wrote a NER tagger, where implementing custom text selection allowed users to not stress about selecting the exact word boundaries when manually tagging 1000s of words per day.

I can probably find legitimate use cases for almost of these things in the list. While I agree with the broader theme of the article, this idea that the user agent should be a dumb display is not valid.

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#64

> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own text selection. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own copy and paste. browser should not even let the page see this action I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see…

> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user?

scrolling: used by games, maps, image viewers

link navigation: used for client-side routing (youtube/twitch, any website with a chat window)

text selection and copy/paste: word processors, spreadsheet editors, forum software, etc.

I'm not sure if your question was sincere or if you were trying to say that the web should not support these use cases.

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#65

> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own text selection. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own copy and paste. browser should not even let the page see this action I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see…

Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. We had Google Docs that didn’t roll-your-own for each of the items in that list and it was called Writely and it was absolute dogshit (but super cool for its time) because those limitations were too extreme. And by extension it wouldn’t make sense to have Chromebooks as a category of hardware, because web sof…

I would rather not have Google Docs than have all the other crap that comes along with allowing every website to do stuff that Google Docs "needs".

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#66

> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own text selection. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own copy and paste. browser should not even let the page see this action I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see…

Applications like Google Docs would be impossible without each of the four things you listed being available. We had Google Docs that didn’t roll-your-own for each of the items in that list and it was called Writely and it was absolute dogshit (but super cool for its time) because those limitations were too extreme. And by extension it wouldn’t make sense to have Chromebooks as a category of hardware, because web sof…

Seems like exactly the kind of thing permissions are for.

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#67
I'd go even more basic than this: only use native everything. It's a travesty that web pages are to use use custom controls or have any kind of look and feel different from the native OS ones. The look and feel of everything (every app, every webpage) should be determined by the end user, via their OS settings, not by the author of the app or document. What we have is designers being able to get to "my app/webpage looks the same for everyone"; what we ought to have is users being able to get to "every app/webpage looks the same for me".

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#68
post #30

> Don't roll your own page scrolling. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own link navigation. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own text selection. browser should not even let the page see this action > Don't roll your own copy and paste. browser should not even let the page see this action I'm serious. WHY javascript code is even allowed to see…

Because the web browser was burdened with the role of application host, and not just presentation of static content. There's no going backwards.

rss

Re: Don't Roll Your Own

#69
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these annoyances and more can be blocked by StopTheMadness (available for iOS and macOS): https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

> Sold separately aaaand you lost my interest the moment money got involved all these things are already fixable by browser extensions - what is lacking is exposing that in browser options and even making it the default

Do you not believe developers should be paid for the work they do? And if not, what do you think the majority of people on this forum do?
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