5 ms·

UI is hard dude. It's been a solved (and re-solved) problem for decades.

by ktRolster 9y ago

ng12 9y ago
There's been a pervasive meme that JavaScript is terrible jQuery is a spaghetti factory. Which is it?
- ktRolster 9y ago
  With the way callbacks work in Javascript and jQuery, you lose some flexibility in organizing your code. It is true the types in Javascript make it difficult to build large projects. These drawbacks can be overcome, of course, but this is all orthogonal to the main point...... If Javascript and jQuery truly are bad (though I would claim they are not, they are mediocre but workable), it's because their creators didn't know history, not because the problem is unsolvable.
  - concede_pluto 9y ago
    Eich wasn't ignorant of history, he just had marching orders to deliver something that resembled Java for marketing reasons, and only a week to finish or be displaced by something worse. The trouble is nobody ever got to fix it until ECMA.
lazyjones 9y ago
UIs on the web suffer much more than UIs elsewhere from the disease of people designing their own UI elements in order to achieve a novel, unique style. Perhaps, some day, this will be considered pointless and unprofessional like on the desktop...
- OtterCoder 9y ago
  But web design philosophy has been creeping on to the desktop for quite a while now. Apps like Skype and Slack are ludicrously overstyled these days. Flash and chrome have always played teeter-totter with utility and functionality, in every field.
mercer 9y ago
But has it been solved if you take into account the various constraints/issues: - clients that range from tiny phone screens to full desktop screens - incompatibility when it comes to what features clients support, and even how they support it - a foundation not meant for UI's that is pretty much required to be abstracted away leakily (HTML, browsers) - serious limitations in payload file size for the entire UI codebase - much of the UI depending on asynchronous operations. The only 'UI' that I can think of that is similar is when I SSH into my server. All other user interfaces are mostly 'local'. - backend systems that are not optimized for these kinds of things I am a relatively 'young' programmer, so maybe I'm utterly wrong about thinking that, considering the above, we're in kind of uncharted territory. By all means correct me! All that said, I do get the feeling 'we' in the javascript world reinvent the wheel more than necessary. But perhaps that's because none of the historical solutions are 'complete' enough to get enough mindshare in the way that, say, Ruby On Rails was, or jQuery. Also, personally I'm becoming more convinced that until all this stabilized, many of use (or at least I personally) might benefit from just not aiming that high when it comes to UI. If I'm honest with myself, an 'old-fashioned' backend that produces HTML with perhaps a few dynamically loaded components (as just HTML fragments, even) is perfectly fine and I truly doubt it would have a negative impact. (hey carsongross, this is where you bring up intercooler.js!)
- user5994461 9y ago
  Have you ever done desktop UI? It does your checklist for 2 decades.
  - mercer 9y ago
    I've done stuff with Delphi back in the day, but I'm not too experienced. Would you mind explaining point by point how desktop UI 'does' this? For example, I can't really think of a desktop app where most of the crucial app/UI logic is reliant on async communication with a server. Most data is stored locally and permanently. I'd actually really like to hear because I have been eying native development lately!
    - 9y ago

UI is hard dude. It's been a solved (and re-solved) problem for decades.

ng12 9y ago

There's been a pervasive meme that JavaScript is terrible jQuery is a spaghetti factory. Which is it?

ktRolster 9y ago
With the way callbacks work in Javascript and jQuery, you lose some flexibility in organizing your code. It is true the types in Javascript make it difficult to build large projects. These drawbacks can be overcome, of course, but this is all orthogonal to the main point...... If Javascript and jQuery truly are bad (though I would claim they are not, they are mediocre but workable), it's because their creators didn't know history, not because the problem is unsolvable.
- concede_pluto 9y ago
  Eich wasn't ignorant of history, he just had marching orders to deliver something that resembled Java for marketing reasons, and only a week to finish or be displaced by something worse. The trouble is nobody ever got to fix it until ECMA.

lazyjones 9y ago

UIs on the web suffer much more than UIs elsewhere from the disease of people designing their own UI elements in order to achieve a novel, unique style. Perhaps, some day, this will be considered pointless and unprofessional like on the desktop...

OtterCoder 9y ago
But web design philosophy has been creeping on to the desktop for quite a while now. Apps like Skype and Slack are ludicrously overstyled these days. Flash and chrome have always played teeter-totter with utility and functionality, in every field.

mercer 9y ago

But has it been solved if you take into account the various constraints/issues: - clients that range from tiny phone screens to full desktop screens - incompatibility when it comes to what features clients support, and even how they support it - a foundation not meant for UI's that is pretty much required to be abstracted away leakily (HTML, browsers) - serious limitations in payload file size for the entire UI codebase - much of the UI depending on asynchronous operations. The only 'UI' that I can think of that is similar is when I SSH into my server. All other user interfaces are mostly 'local'. - backend systems that are not optimized for these kinds of things I am a relatively 'young' programmer, so maybe I'm utterly wrong about thinking that, considering the above, we're in kind of uncharted territory. By all means correct me! All that said, I do get the feeling 'we' in the javascript world reinvent the wheel more than necessary. But perhaps that's because none of the historical solutions are 'complete' enough to get enough mindshare in the way that, say, Ruby On Rails was, or jQuery. Also, personally I'm becoming more convinced that until all this stabilized, many of use (or at least I personally) might benefit from just not aiming that high when it comes to UI. If I'm honest with myself, an 'old-fashioned' backend that produces HTML with perhaps a few dynamically loaded components (as just HTML fragments, even) is perfectly fine and I truly doubt it would have a negative impact. (hey carsongross, this is where you bring up intercooler.js!)

user5994461 9y ago
Have you ever done desktop UI? It does your checklist for 2 decades.
- mercer 9y ago
  I've done stuff with Delphi back in the day, but I'm not too experienced. Would you mind explaining point by point how desktop UI 'does' this? For example, I can't really think of a desktop app where most of the crucial app/UI logic is reliant on async communication with a server. Most data is stored locally and permanently. I'd actually really like to hear because I have been eying native development lately!
  - 9y ago