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I don't get this criticism. HTML/CSS is the closest we have to a universally understood syntax for designing interfaces. Why invent a new standard? HTML is fi

• coldtea 10y ago
  >Why invent a new standard? Because they suck?
  • dvdcxn 10y ago
    Care to argue why? Also, there are countless alternative languages to compile down to HTML or CSS available. Feel free to create your own if none agree with your personal leanings.
    • simion314 10y ago
      CSS has many weird is corner cases where you have an issue and after a lot of debugging, trying things, getting mad you find on Stack Overflow that you add a ilogical rule like "min-width:0", so css is ok until you end up in a tricky problem where you need to understand how the css code works under the hood to fix. Other issue with css is too big and complicated, good layout modes are added but we stil ahve the old ones and you need to understand everything because most developers work on existing code and you hit all kind of layouts like floating,absolute,relative. Flexbox layout seems better but stil worse then layouts I have seen in MXML and WPF. So ignoring JS that you could replace, getting a new GUI for the Web inspired by MXML/WPF or QML with a sane subset of css would improve the situation.
      • obsurveyor 10y ago
        > you add a ilogical rule like "min-width:0" Yeah, like my favorite of these lately, widows and orphans. Chrome changed a default that affected inline-blocks within columns that caused them to wrap prematurely after version 52 or so. It is especially bad because the other popular browsers don't even support these yet and looked fine.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      >Care to argue why? Where do I start? 1) Designed for document presentation, not for apps. 2) Limited widget selection (native forms and that's it). 3) Different implementations between vendors. 4) Bad at layout (20+ years to get to Flex and Grid CSS layout which kind of resembles UI layouts but is still not supported everywhere. 5) Slow 6) Batter hungry 7) Too many un-needed UI layers (DOM over native widgets) 8) Extra language layer (JS on top of v8 on top of native execution) 9) JS is not the best language to write large scale software (to put it mildly) 10) Restricted access/integration to native platform APIs.
    • ksk 10y ago
      Do you want to listen to the reasons, or just tell them to "go make your own if you don't like it"? You can't have it both ways. I agree that simply saying X sucks is not a valid argument. Howeever with CSS/HTML the flaws are too numerous and already discussed ad nauseam over the past 15 years. Everytime a new version of CSS comes out, people go and try it and find out that it sucks, whether its th broken box model or the broken float layout techniques or the constant fiddling you are forced to do to get anything working. Every web developer I've seen adopts the 'edit and refresh' trial and error model of developing which is the direct result of a bad spec. Which also explains why there isn't even a reference implementation. As far as UI layout is concerned I am fairly sure I could out-compete a web developer in terms of time taken to implement, using something like IMGUI.
      • pcwalton 10y ago
        > Which also explains why there isn't even a reference implementation. As someone who has spent years implementing those standards, a reference implementation would not help me at all. > As far as UI layout is concerned I am fairly sure I could out-compete a web developer in terms of time taken to implement, using something like IMGUI. Dear imgui's layout model doesn't scale at all, due to the fact that it's immediate mode. It redoes layout from scratch every frame.
        • ksk 10y ago
          >As someone who has spent years implementing those standards, a reference implementation would not help me at all. I don't quite understand what you meant your comment to be indicative of. That nobody else would consider it useful? That you personally see no value in reference implementations at all? >Dear imgui's layout model doesn't scale at all, due to the fact that it's immediate mode. It redoes layout from scratch every frame. Could you detail the UI are you thinking of where IMGUI is inefficient but HTML/CSS isn't? Not asking for a formal spec, just a general usecase.. My problem with CSS/HTML is that productivity scales inversely when using them.
        • coldtea 10y ago
          >a reference implementation would not help me at all. Well, considering that the web has been for decades a landmine of subtle rendering differences based on different interpretations of the same standards, it would surely help others... Also, I'm not sure what you're saying here. That, warts and all, you love the web as a programming platform? Well, maybe you do. But then again, you don't program everyday IN it. You program a rendering engine for it in Rust, so you're safely protected from the horrors of web programming. >Dear imgui's layout model doesn't scale at all, due to the fact that it's immediate mode. It redoes layout from scratch every frame. Aren't (or at least weren't) most computer games "immediate mode" too, and far more demanding than any web page?
  • vetinari 10y ago
    There was XUL and it used native widgets. XUL is dead now, HTML+CSS won.
• kitsunesoba 10y ago
  Just because it's the best we have (if you're looking for a cross platform solution, anyway) doesn't mean that we've reached the peak and can just quit. We can do a hell of a lot better, and doing anything less is tragically underselling ourselves. There are no laws of physics preventing a better solution from existing. No, creating something better isn't easy, but neither have any of the other technological breakthroughs. HTML/JS/CSS is just a stepping stone like any other, not an endgame. Don't grow complacent with it. Demand something better.
  • thomastjeffery 10y ago
    > it's the best we have (if you're looking for a cross platform solution, anyway) No it's not. If you want a fast full-featured cross-platform GUI toolkit, there are many: GTK+ and Qt are especially great, and have bindings for several languages.
    • efdee 10y ago
      I can't speak for Qt, but GTK+ is not that great outside of the Linux bubble. IMHO, of course.
      • sqeaky 10y ago
        They aren't that great in the Linux bubble. I say that from the developer and the user perspective.
      • fetbaffe 10y ago
        Qt is not that fun either, at least two years ago. Old style class hierarchies, clunky abstractions and awful build step (QMAKE). It got better with the use of lambdas, no longer necessary to have class to connect to a signal, lambda works as well. However QML is an improvement. It was a bit quirky to get render the way you wanted and it was not native & look and feel, but maybe have gotten better since I used it. I could imagine that TypeScript + QML could be quite pleasant. Big downside is that the install size of your program is quite big.
    • 10y ago
• yumaikas 10y ago
  HTML and CSS are a bad fit for rendering heavy graphical interfaces because they fundamentally follow a document flow rather than grid-based layouts. Flexbox and css-grid are helping some in this area, but they are not used very often. (not to say that HTML and CSS aren't useful, but they are far from the idea means of rendering a UI). HTML does work fine when you use it for mostly document focused work, and I enjoy the interactivity and connectivity that web browsers have brought to the web, but I'd love to see an improvement on it all.
  • pcwalton 10y ago
    Flexbox is that improvement. If you discount flexbox due to "not [being] used very often", then you can't logically argue for burning down the HTML and CSS stack and replacing it with something else that has zero market share.
    • dheera 10y ago
      Q: How do you make a video maintain an aspect ratio and fill up the width of a parent? A: Nested div hell. Q: How do you make an image maintain an aspect ratio and fill up the width or height of the screen, whichever comes first? A: Nested div hell and JavaScript. Q: How do you make a scaled background image stay put even when the keyboard input pops up on a phone? A: Supreme JavaScript, CSS, and div hell. Q: How do you center a paragraph of text vertically in a div? A: Nested div hell. I'd say FlexBox is pretty inadequate. Why can't we have things like: #my-video {width:80%;height:calc(width*2/3);}
      • pcwalton 10y ago
        CSS object-fit handles your first two complaints, and CSS Variables handles your last one.
        • Dylan16807 10y ago
          Aren't CSS Variables just constants you can reuse? How are they going to let you set width to 80% and height to 2/3 of whatever that ends up being?
• panic 10y ago
  Why invent a new standard? HTML is fine, CSS is fine. Most importantly, everyone understands it and can work immediately with it. In order to render HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you need an entire web rendering engine. A new standard would let us get by with a lot less.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > In order to render HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you need an entire web rendering engine. Getting to piggyback on V8 and Blink work is, I suspect, often a benefit rather than a cost in the eyes of developers of Electron-based editors. Sure, it's bigger resource load, but for use cases where the performance is acceptable, it's a lot less developer load to get the functionality out the door.
    • allendoerfer 10y ago
      Until you have to reimplement even blinking cursors.
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
        No, even after that I'm pretty sure it's a net win in developer time.
• rimliu 10y ago
  > everyone understands it and can work immediately with it. Only if by "understands" you mean "everyone is capable to throw things at the wall and seeing what sticks". I have seen a lot o HTML and CSS and let's just say, only a small fraction looked like it was done by someone with understanding "what" and "why". Otherwise it was just tortured to the point "somehow works unless someone changes something".