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I'm old enough that I started out building desktop apps with native widgets. You had consistent, easy to use UIs, and they were pretty much the same no matter w

I'm old enough that I started out building desktop apps with native widgets. You had consistent, easy to use UIs, and they were pretty much the same no matter what application you where in. Building the UI was considered they easy part. You could even draw the thing with drawing tools! Since the native widgets were designed by people who spend all day thinking about UI, user testing UI, etc everything pretty much just worked, and worked well. Fast forward to today. There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app. So everyone rolls their own. Everyone keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. Everyone is chasing fads. There is no consistency from app to app. Today building the UI is the hard part. (x-windows was the exception of course - you could choose from a dozen badly designed window managers and widget sets.)

zozbot234 7y ago
> There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app. HTML form elements are essentially "native" widgets, if only native to the browser. The problem with them is that older browsers lack support for many desirable widgets (e.g. calendar date entry), so some "UI-building" work is still needed.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Html form elements are laughably limited if you want to make an app - despite the years of using the web for apps, HTML+CSS is still only really usable for document-like pages. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind, there is something to be said about how huge browsers are becoming, and shipping a full widget toolkit would bloat that up even more.
- tabtab 7y ago
  There should be an HTTP-friendly GUI standard and we should have GUI browsers that implement all the common GUI widgets we know and love rather than emulate them with buggy clunky JavaScript/DOM/CSS. And be state-friendly to avoid having to use Ajax-like techniques to get desktop-like state. The industry is simply missing a standard. Everyone was hoping HTML/JS/CSS would mature enough to solve it, but it didn't, despite being given 2+ decades. Developing in and using web standards for anything data-centric or highly interactive is a royal pain. You need rocket science to build a bicycle. Time for a dedicated bicycle standard.
dredmorbius 7y ago
There are any number of Web design failures which are traceable to either bad defaults or missing basic functionality. Standardisation on more of these elements, and maybe bisecting or further splitting current browser roles to (principally) textual content, commerce, multimedia, and applications, rather than cramming all four roles (poorly) into a single app, might help.
TheKarateKid 7y ago
Good point! This is especially the case in iOS/Android, where almost every app uses their own completely custom UI and design on everything "just because". Remember when most apps used the iOS/Android OS-provided UI's? Customization was there when needed but dialog boxes, drop-downs, etc. were uniform across the OS. This is why every app and its mother didn't need a UI/UX designer until the past few years.

zozbot234 7y ago

> There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app. HTML form elements are essentially "native" widgets, if only native to the browser. The problem with them is that older browsers lack support for many desirable widgets (e.g. calendar date entry), so some "UI-building" work is still needed.

tsimionescu 7y ago
Html form elements are laughably limited if you want to make an app - despite the years of using the web for apps, HTML+CSS is still only really usable for document-like pages. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind, there is something to be said about how huge browsers are becoming, and shipping a full widget toolkit would bloat that up even more.
tabtab 7y ago
There should be an HTTP-friendly GUI standard and we should have GUI browsers that implement all the common GUI widgets we know and love rather than emulate them with buggy clunky JavaScript/DOM/CSS. And be state-friendly to avoid having to use Ajax-like techniques to get desktop-like state. The industry is simply missing a standard. Everyone was hoping HTML/JS/CSS would mature enough to solve it, but it didn't, despite being given 2+ decades. Developing in and using web standards for anything data-centric or highly interactive is a royal pain. You need rocket science to build a bicycle. Time for a dedicated bicycle standard.

dredmorbius 7y ago

There are any number of Web design failures which are traceable to either bad defaults or missing basic functionality. Standardisation on more of these elements, and maybe bisecting or further splitting current browser roles to (principally) textual content, commerce, multimedia, and applications, rather than cramming all four roles (poorly) into a single app, might help.

TheKarateKid 7y ago

Good point! This is especially the case in iOS/Android, where almost every app uses their own completely custom UI and design on everything "just because". Remember when most apps used the iOS/Android OS-provided UI's? Customization was there when needed but dialog boxes, drop-downs, etc. were uniform across the OS. This is why every app and its mother didn't need a UI/UX designer until the past few years.