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It may not possible, but that doesn't mean the HTML and CSS clusterfuck is anywhere near the level we'd have expected back in the 1990s. None of the tools we ha

by alxlaz 7y ago

It may not possible, but that doesn't mean the HTML and CSS clusterfuck is anywhere near the level we'd have expected back in the 1990s. None of the tools we have today can hold a candle to a proper UI builder -- which would suffice for a lot of "progressive" web apps. Back In The Day (TM), with a proper UI builder (as seen in Visual Basic, C++ Builder, Qt Designer) I could build ten different versions of the same dialog, for ten different resolutions and aspect ratios, in about the same time it takes me to get a button to stay where I want it in CSS. And, by the way, the weirdness of the day -- and the capabilities of the tools -- shouldn't be underestimated! The good ones did proper relative positioning and alignment, supported various kinds of "flowing" layouts and so on. It wasn't uncommon to have to support all modes between 640x480@4 and 2048x1536@32, and basically no applications ran in full-screen mode, so you didn't have about a dozen resolutions and aspect ratios, you had pretty much an infinite number of combinations.

danso 7y ago
Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the generated HTML/CSS/JS that it generates, but don't services like Wix make it incredibly easy for a layperson to build a servicable and attractive UI? Again, I reiterate that the generated code is an absolute clusterfuck (even compared to what I remember Frontpage 99 making), but from what I can tell, the end-user never touches the generated raw code.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  Tools like the ones I mentioned weren't meant to allow a layperson to build an UI, they were meant to allow developers to build an UI. The experience hasn't degraded much for people who don't write code for a living, but it has degraded significantly for developers. FWIW, it's part of why I moved away from all this stuff, more than 15 years ago. I discovered a lot of other fun things computers could do (I got into embedded programming, operating systems, security etc.), and web development stopped being fun when we seriously continued digging the hole we were into instead of climbing out of it.
  - y4mi 7y ago
    > web development stopped being fun when we seriously continued digging the hole we were into instead of climbing out of it. well, at least we got docker and kubernetes to save the day and can scale infinitely with our superior CI which sadly breaks every built and needs a whole department to shepart into this brave new world

by alxlaz 7y ago

danso 7y ago

Granted, I'm not a huge fan of the generated HTML/CSS/JS that it generates, but don't services like Wix make it incredibly easy for a layperson to build a servicable and attractive UI? Again, I reiterate that the generated code is an absolute clusterfuck (even compared to what I remember Frontpage 99 making), but from what I can tell, the end-user never touches the generated raw code.

alxlaz 7y ago
Tools like the ones I mentioned weren't meant to allow a layperson to build an UI, they were meant to allow developers to build an UI. The experience hasn't degraded much for people who don't write code for a living, but it has degraded significantly for developers. FWIW, it's part of why I moved away from all this stuff, more than 15 years ago. I discovered a lot of other fun things computers could do (I got into embedded programming, operating systems, security etc.), and web development stopped being fun when we seriously continued digging the hole we were into instead of climbing out of it.
- y4mi 7y ago
  > web development stopped being fun when we seriously continued digging the hole we were into instead of climbing out of it. well, at least we got docker and kubernetes to save the day and can scale infinitely with our superior CI which sadly breaks every built and needs a whole department to shepart into this brave new world