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If you have compilers and GUI tools, how does it matter than the underlying layer is HTML+CSS+JSON? The designer shouldn't see it anyway. Now that we have a we

If you have compilers and GUI tools, how does it matter than the underlying layer is HTML+CSS+JSON? The designer shouldn't see it anyway. Now that we have a web-aware platform (which NeWS was not), nothing stops us to create good UI tools on top - yet it is happening very slowly.

pjmlp 10y ago
You mean by piling up <div>, <span>, CSS and JavaScript?
- TuringTest 10y ago
  Yes, why not? That's no different than piling objects in a GUI widget library to build a tree structure for the layout of a window; except that it has a human-readable string representation.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing. Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in. And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.
    - TuringTest 10y ago
      > I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn How well does that work when your GUI must be shown in arbitrary devices, with arbitrary screen sizes and arbitrary resolutions? And how well does it reflow when the user changes the viewport size? In any case, the original post to which I replied was comparing HTML5 to the NeWS platform, which provided a unified UI stack itself, so you wouldn't be able to match the native behavior following that approach either.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        That is what layout managers and logical pixels are for. You are missing the fact that NeWS offered this kind of control. "The NeWS Book" - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863