3 ms·

Gopher was arguably more consistent in both regards. But pretty vs functional wasn't even a tradeoff you could really consider.

• dmix 7y ago
  The protocols certainly influence the designs but there’s always a level of flexibility in the clients (ie, browsers) which the app devs will still have to wrangle. Some devs value consistency across platforms so their app always looks and functions the same. But I personally think it’s best to default to the system’s UI. Sure I can make it look Mac-esque on desktop Firefox on Windows but I’d rather it look and function exactly like every other windowed application they use on the platform. There’s also nothing inherent in using JS heavy frontends like React which encourages non-standard browser behaviour. You can still present complex interactive elements while keeping scrolling and other usability stuff like back buttons, copy/pasting, form input behaviour (not breaking LastPass and browser autocomplete for ex), not losing form data on submit after validation errors, etc. You have to go out of your way to explicitly modify default browser behaviour, usually via 3rd party libraries added on to these frameworks. Personally I found it was far more common in the jQuery world, which is still rampant among those awful prebuilt themes people and companies always use for their websites.