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I read the email and url tags and thought "Cool! Finally the developers have it easy" but when I got to the slider and date section, I suddenly realized how bac
by chime 17y ago
I read the email and url tags and thought "Cool! Finally the developers have it easy" but when I got to the slider and date section, I suddenly realized how backwards the web-standards really are in comparison to developing desktop-apps. Everything from Visual Studio and Office to wxWidgets has had these tools in their toolboxes for years. I've used the comctl32 date picker for a decade now. I placed a slider control on a VB3.0 form in 1997. Thirteen years later the web still doesn't have either and every single travel website has to implement it on their own (badly).
Instead of feeling excited over the new features of HTML5, I feel kinda sad that there still isn't a way to create live datalinks, sortable/filterable tables, listviews, tree-views, and real comboboxes (editable text + listbox) on the web without having to hack something up. Google made a great push towards replacing desktop-apps by creating a really fast browser but that doesn't make it any easier for web developers to create apps that work as well as desktop-apps. I once spent a week writing my own scrollbar and even as I wrote it, I knew I was wasting resources. However, it was a necessary feature for the project and if HTML scrollbars triggered the different events like those in almost any desktop platform, I wouldn't have had to write one from scratch.
I think it's great that the iPhone/Safari shows the most appropriate keyboard but compare the controls that iPhone SDK app developers can use vs. those that the iPhone web-app developers can call and you will see why HTML still has a very long way to go. And honestly, I don't see why a damn combobox has taken so long when almost every single web-app has a need for it ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278431/why-does-html-5-not-have-editable-combobox-or-local-menus-built-in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1278431/why-does-html-5-n... ).
- nicpottier 17y agoYou need to look into YUI. It satisfies your requirements and is nicely cross-browser. Their datamodel is also built so as to support tables going against a server for the data etc.. Good stuff.. there's a learning curve there for sure, but it is well built and free.
- chime 17y agoI've used YUI, extjs, jqueryui etc. and all of them are good for what they do. My point was that these tools need to be natively supported by browsers so I don't have to worry about incorporating any additional UI library for basic apps. If the listbox (html SELECT) exists as an html element, why not a combo box?
- GHFigs 17y agoI recommend reading this, incidentally by the same author: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-a... It won't answer your question, but it will give you insight into the messy way the web evolves, which is about the closest thing to an answer you'll ever get.
- GHFigs 17y agoBear in mind that HTML wasn't intended to do any of this. You say it has a "long way to go", but the fact that you're even comparing web apps to desktop apps without talking about ActiveX or Java applets (as we did 10-13 years ago) is a sign that open standard HTML/CSS/JS has come a very long way. Given the challenges of developing cross-platform standards compared to proprietary or platform-specific APIs, I'm personally amazed that any of this stuff works.
- scott_s 17y agoIn support of your point, we should remember that HTML was originally envisioned as document markup. Now that the web is not really comprised of documents but applications, HTML is changing to represent this. Non-HTML solutions have to lead the standardization process so that the standards committee knows what to standardize. We didn't know ten years ago that it would even make sense to put some of this stuff into HTML.