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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 t
by 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 agoMost 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 agoThis 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 agoThis 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 agoIndeed. 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 agoThis 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 agoThose 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 agoI'd like to pose a WhatsApp commerce group as a counterexample.
- ehnto 9y agoA 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 agoI 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.