8 ms·

I used vb6 20 years ago and have recently (quite unfortunately) had to learn html/js/css basics. The web is hot garbage for displaying form data compared to mi

by x0x0 9y ago

I used vb6 20 years ago and have recently (quite unfortunately) had to learn html/js/css basics. The web is hot garbage for displaying form data compared to microsoft tools circa 1996.

petra 9y ago
The web isn't the place to look for good tooling. Properiatery low-code tools built over the web are a better starting point.
- zzzzerp 9y ago
  I prefer no-code to low-code solutions. Good lord I hate this buzzword bingo. How the hell are proprietary low-code tools better? In what world is that a sane response?
  - petra 9y ago
    They are simpler.
Udik 9y ago
The problem is that if you present an average web user with the interface you can design (quickly and efficiently) in VB6, they'll spit in your face. Much of the complexity of web design is not in the tools; it's in the fact that users don't expect a standard whatsoever, they just expect their UIs to be as slick and customly designed as magazines. If every website was written using the same standard, predefined set of widgets and components, the complexity would disappear.
- olmo 9y ago
  Most enterprise web apps use bootstrap, that is quite Standart. But they do it on top of react/angular/grunt/we pack and a zillion npm packages to choose and keep updated. Nothing of this was necessary to make VB6 applications.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    This is true, the monstrosity I inherited at work is built on bootstrap (2...and it was started after 3 came out..) but modern tooling has radically improved. yarn/typescript and (though some days I hate it..it has gotten better) webpack largely make it feel sane(r). That said getting to a point where I was comfortable with all three was insanely more complex and time consuming that picking up Delphi 6 was in the early 2000's. Shrugs, the beast is what it is until someone does something better.
- namelost 9y ago
  This is a really observant point. Users expect every website to have a unique identity (unlike anything built with WinForms), that is what creates the complexity. If you actually use something like bootstrap, your website will look unoriginal, but it will be dead easy to make.
  - mike_hearn 9y ago
    Indeed. The lack of easy theming (i.e. difficulty of producing a unique visual brand) is one reason why desktop toolkits lost out to the web, amongst many others.
- gkya 9y ago
  This is pure illusion. Otherwise reddit, 4chan, hn, google (until 2010), craigslist, and even amazon would suffocate and go away. The fact is that what makes a web app / web site / whatever be liked by the users is the content and the value; and often times a 2005 porn pop-under is better at that than a today's chic, pedantically over-designed website with grey huge lettering, multi-MB graphics, and tonnes of wasted empty areas. They are basically like coke, blunt useless stuff with lots of sugar.
  - ehnto 9y ago
    Those communities are all very niche, and in fact part of their brand and image is in their design. Even though they are less flashy, that is the point. Try to convince the owner of a clothing ecommerce site that their store should look like a 4chan bulletin board while trying to sell high priced garments to the public, or that the Coke website can't have a vibrant design in line with the rest of their branding.
    - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
      I'd like to pose a WhatsApp commerce group as a counterexample.
      - ehnto 9y ago
        A good counter! However it also helps the argument that the web is diverse enough that having a hyper flexible UI system is beneficial.
    - Endy 9y ago
      I don't understand one point here - why wouldn't Coke be able to have vibrancy? Animated .GIF images have worked very reliably for web layouts since... forever; and I don't think anyone's going to start calling for everything to be pastels online or in a fixed color scheme. I don't feel that Reddit is by any means 'niche', either. And of course a clothing store (which is an e-commerce product) should look different from an image board; again, no one in their right mind is going to demand otherwise. But they should be able to be defined by the same set of tools (personally, when I design webpages, even under WordPress, I still use HTML tables and the center tag. Heck, I've used the marquee tag in the last year.
api 9y ago
MS really had rapid GUI development absolutely nailed in the late 90s. For some reason we forgot all that.
- jkmcf 9y ago
  MS had nothing on Sun’s Dev Guide, the easiest and best GUI dev tool i’ve ever seen. I say this because it took me zero effort to use due to how intuitive it was to get started...
  - ibdknox 9y ago
    do you have any pointers for learning about it? Looking up "Sun Dev Guide" didn't seem to find me anything related to GUI editors.
- otakucode 9y ago
  I was really surprised when I went and wanted to build a GUI app to find that everyone had abandoned the WYSIWG model completely. You can't just drag your controls over, set their properties, then build the code to drive everything. You have to manually wrestle with containers and whatnot even for desktop things. I could potentially see it as an acceptable tradeoff for wide device compatibility (things with substantially different screen dimensions, etc)... but I still have yet to figure out why the layout systems of the past couldn't simply be made a little bit smart to deduce the constraints necessary to result in the same development experience as before.
  - api 9y ago
    I've come to believe that some number of developers actually like it the hard way. It's the only explanation that makes sense. We have gone so far backward in GUI development tools.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    WPF still works nicely for prototyping in a visual editor. Declarative is much more robust than the old imperative awt/swing/winforms.
catnaroek 9y ago
It's a pity that (classic) VB's excellent Form Designer is tied to such an ugly language.
- int_19h 9y ago
  VB6's form designer (and UI framework that underlies it) has one crucial problem: it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window, or font size or family changes (even if it's something as simple as accommodating high DPI), or you localize the dialog and some strings become longer. This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.
  - catnaroek 9y ago
    > it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some automation is fine (e.g., how MFC resizes views in response to their parent frame being resized) as long as simplicity isn't lost in the process (I'm looking at you, CSS).
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning. It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.
      - tluyben2 9y ago
        Are they? Most 'web apps' I use have a preferable browser size; if you use them at a smaller size they still work (they are responsive) but are just unusable for anything sane. So superior... I made those layouts with Delphi too early 90s and the same consistent behavior was true then as it is now; 99% (to not get 'source?' questions; I have been writing consumer software for almost 30 years and in my experience + the experience of peers I talk to) of consumer users of software click on maximize the first instance they open anything; browser or non browser. So sure, I use tiling window managers and like different windows, but most people don't, hence the success of tablets; they are simple because 1 app, maximized at a time. And those apps sure are responsive but they don't need to be; they look the same on all tablets for the resolution they were designed to be used at. Just simply scaling them would've worked fine for most people and usecases. You would have to write things twice; one for small screens (phones) and one for big screens (desktops) but that's not really that uncommon now either.
gregmac 9y ago
The big problem is they are trying to solve different problems. Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls. Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things. If you're building forms applications that only need to work on a PC, the old way was certainly easier, and in fact, Microsoft has WebForms (regular ASP.NET - not MVC or API) that is pretty similar (and doesn't horribly break down so long as you color within the lines, so to speak). Try to imagine your vb6 app being able to scale down to window the size of a phone screen, and how the WYSIWYG editor for that works even work - I imagine it would be fair to describe it as "hot garbage" also.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Super easy, VB.NET with WPF or UWP layouts.
  - gregmac 9y ago
    WPF is much closer to web development than the drag and drop WYSIWYG UI development (VB6 / WinForms) the OP was taking about. I've never done UWP but it sounds nearly the same as WPF.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      WPF/UWP have exactly the same drag and drop WYSIWYG support as Windows Forms, specially when using Blend, actual components and an healthy market of companies selling them.
- mike_hearn 9y ago
  Very few web apps actually use the same HTML for desktop and mobile. It's more common for WordPress templates and other document-like things, but the UI constraints on a phone are so different that it's better to create a dedicated UI for them. So I'm not sure judging VB6 by that metric is valuable.

by x0x0 9y ago

I used vb6 20 years ago and have recently (quite unfortunately) had to learn html/js/css basics. The web is hot garbage for displaying form data compared to microsoft tools circa 1996.

petra 9y ago

The web isn't the place to look for good tooling. Properiatery low-code tools built over the web are a better starting point.

zzzzerp 9y ago
I prefer no-code to low-code solutions. Good lord I hate this buzzword bingo. How the hell are proprietary low-code tools better? In what world is that a sane response?
- petra 9y ago
  They are simpler.

Udik 9y ago

The problem is that if you present an average web user with the interface you can design (quickly and efficiently) in VB6, they'll spit in your face. Much of the complexity of web design is not in the tools; it's in the fact that users don't expect a standard whatsoever, they just expect their UIs to be as slick and customly designed as magazines. If every website was written using the same standard, predefined set of widgets and components, the complexity would disappear.

olmo 9y ago
Most enterprise web apps use bootstrap, that is quite Standart. But they do it on top of react/angular/grunt/we pack and a zillion npm packages to choose and keep updated. Nothing of this was necessary to make VB6 applications.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  This is true, the monstrosity I inherited at work is built on bootstrap (2...and it was started after 3 came out..) but modern tooling has radically improved. yarn/typescript and (though some days I hate it..it has gotten better) webpack largely make it feel sane(r). That said getting to a point where I was comfortable with all three was insanely more complex and time consuming that picking up Delphi 6 was in the early 2000's. Shrugs, the beast is what it is until someone does something better.
namelost 9y ago
This is a really observant point. Users expect every website to have a unique identity (unlike anything built with WinForms), that is what creates the complexity. If you actually use something like bootstrap, your website will look unoriginal, but it will be dead easy to make.
- mike_hearn 9y ago
  Indeed. The lack of easy theming (i.e. difficulty of producing a unique visual brand) is one reason why desktop toolkits lost out to the web, amongst many others.
gkya 9y ago
This is pure illusion. Otherwise reddit, 4chan, hn, google (until 2010), craigslist, and even amazon would suffocate and go away. The fact is that what makes a web app / web site / whatever be liked by the users is the content and the value; and often times a 2005 porn pop-under is better at that than a today's chic, pedantically over-designed website with grey huge lettering, multi-MB graphics, and tonnes of wasted empty areas. They are basically like coke, blunt useless stuff with lots of sugar.
- ehnto 9y ago
  Those communities are all very niche, and in fact part of their brand and image is in their design. Even though they are less flashy, that is the point. Try to convince the owner of a clothing ecommerce site that their store should look like a 4chan bulletin board while trying to sell high priced garments to the public, or that the Coke website can't have a vibrant design in line with the rest of their branding.
  - Karrot_Kream 9y ago
    I'd like to pose a WhatsApp commerce group as a counterexample.
    - ehnto 9y ago
      A good counter! However it also helps the argument that the web is diverse enough that having a hyper flexible UI system is beneficial.
  - Endy 9y ago
    I don't understand one point here - why wouldn't Coke be able to have vibrancy? Animated .GIF images have worked very reliably for web layouts since... forever; and I don't think anyone's going to start calling for everything to be pastels online or in a fixed color scheme. I don't feel that Reddit is by any means 'niche', either. And of course a clothing store (which is an e-commerce product) should look different from an image board; again, no one in their right mind is going to demand otherwise. But they should be able to be defined by the same set of tools (personally, when I design webpages, even under WordPress, I still use HTML tables and the center tag. Heck, I've used the marquee tag in the last year.

api 9y ago

MS really had rapid GUI development absolutely nailed in the late 90s. For some reason we forgot all that.

jkmcf 9y ago
MS had nothing on Sun’s Dev Guide, the easiest and best GUI dev tool i’ve ever seen. I say this because it took me zero effort to use due to how intuitive it was to get started...
- ibdknox 9y ago
  do you have any pointers for learning about it? Looking up "Sun Dev Guide" didn't seem to find me anything related to GUI editors.
otakucode 9y ago
I was really surprised when I went and wanted to build a GUI app to find that everyone had abandoned the WYSIWG model completely. You can't just drag your controls over, set their properties, then build the code to drive everything. You have to manually wrestle with containers and whatnot even for desktop things. I could potentially see it as an acceptable tradeoff for wide device compatibility (things with substantially different screen dimensions, etc)... but I still have yet to figure out why the layout systems of the past couldn't simply be made a little bit smart to deduce the constraints necessary to result in the same development experience as before.
- api 9y ago
  I've come to believe that some number of developers actually like it the hard way. It's the only explanation that makes sense. We have gone so far backward in GUI development tools.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  WPF still works nicely for prototyping in a visual editor. Declarative is much more robust than the old imperative awt/swing/winforms.

catnaroek 9y ago

It's a pity that (classic) VB's excellent Form Designer is tied to such an ugly language.

int_19h 9y ago
VB6's form designer (and UI framework that underlies it) has one crucial problem: it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window, or font size or family changes (even if it's something as simple as accommodating high DPI), or you localize the dialog and some strings become longer. This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.
- catnaroek 9y ago
  > it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some automation is fine (e.g., how MFC resizes views in response to their parent frame being resized) as long as simplicity isn't lost in the process (I'm looking at you, CSS).
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning. It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.
    - tluyben2 9y ago
      Are they? Most 'web apps' I use have a preferable browser size; if you use them at a smaller size they still work (they are responsive) but are just unusable for anything sane. So superior... I made those layouts with Delphi too early 90s and the same consistent behavior was true then as it is now; 99% (to not get 'source?' questions; I have been writing consumer software for almost 30 years and in my experience + the experience of peers I talk to) of consumer users of software click on maximize the first instance they open anything; browser or non browser. So sure, I use tiling window managers and like different windows, but most people don't, hence the success of tablets; they are simple because 1 app, maximized at a time. And those apps sure are responsive but they don't need to be; they look the same on all tablets for the resolution they were designed to be used at. Just simply scaling them would've worked fine for most people and usecases. You would have to write things twice; one for small screens (phones) and one for big screens (desktops) but that's not really that uncommon now either.

gregmac 9y ago

The big problem is they are trying to solve different problems. Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls. Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things. If you're building forms applications that only need to work on a PC, the old way was certainly easier, and in fact, Microsoft has WebForms (regular ASP.NET - not MVC or API) that is pretty similar (and doesn't horribly break down so long as you color within the lines, so to speak). Try to imagine your vb6 app being able to scale down to window the size of a phone screen, and how the WYSIWYG editor for that works even work - I imagine it would be fair to describe it as "hot garbage" also.

pjmlp 9y ago
Super easy, VB.NET with WPF or UWP layouts.
- gregmac 9y ago
  WPF is much closer to web development than the drag and drop WYSIWYG UI development (VB6 / WinForms) the OP was taking about. I've never done UWP but it sounds nearly the same as WPF.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    WPF/UWP have exactly the same drag and drop WYSIWYG support as Windows Forms, specially when using Blend, actual components and an healthy market of companies selling them.
mike_hearn 9y ago
Very few web apps actually use the same HTML for desktop and mobile. It's more common for WordPress templates and other document-like things, but the UI constraints on a phone are so different that it's better to create a dedicated UI for them. So I'm not sure judging VB6 by that metric is valuable.