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Maybe this is making me sound old, but... the DOM is definitely not an optimal way of laying out a UI. It was designed for documents, and UIs have been repeated

Maybe this is making me sound old, but... the DOM is definitely not an optimal way of laying out a UI. It was designed for documents, and UIs have been repeatedly jammed into it until they fit. Newer CSS stuff (eg flexbox) help smooth that out a bit, but it’s still a gong show compared to actual UI toolkits (Qt, Cocoa, etc).

hollerith 7y ago
I keep hearing that, but I've used many of UIs over the years, and I prefer the UIs of VS Code, github.com, or Gmail to any of the UIs I can think of built with "actual" UI toolkits. Maybe I like text more than the average user, though.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  Heh, I think it's a matter of preferences really. Emacs is my daily driver for an editor. I access Gmail via Thunderbird instead of the web UI. I do use Github via a browser, but pretty much just for doing code reviews or creating a new repository. Branching etc all happens on the command line. Looking at my current list of open apps on this machine, it's a bit of a mixed bag: - iMessage (native) - Chrome - iTerm2 (native) - Fusion 360 (uhhh something weird, dunno) - Spotify (Electron) - XCode (native) - Emacs (native-ish, maybe GTK?) - Thunderbird (native-ish, I think it's still laid out with XUL) - Slack (Electron) - Keybase (Electron) One thing to note: most of the time I am in the city, but have a second home in a rural area. When I'm out there on a spotty tethered connection, all of the above Electron apps have to get closed because they lose their minds when there's a spotty connection. Slack in particular likes to steal focus/pop up over everything when it is in a loop trying to reconnect. Spotify gets into a weird state where the UI gets unresponsive. Keybase doesn't really complain much.
  - hollerith 7y ago
    It might interest you to know that graphical Emacs on a Mac uses purely native UI APIs. No GTK. (And I wish Chrome used those native Mac UI APIs as well as Mitsuharu Emacs does.)
    - tonyarkles 7y ago
      I figured it might!
icebraining 7y ago
Counterpoint: a DOM is just a tree of objects that represent a UI page/window. If you look at, say, QML, there's a DOM as well, and even if you write it in code, there's still an hierarchy of objects. I'm not sure the DOM is the problem.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  That's fair! I suppose it's more that DOM+CSS has only recently really started to have broad support for more UI-oriented layout. Things like "make these N boxes all the same width, even if N changes" :)

hollerith 7y ago

I keep hearing that, but I've used many of UIs over the years, and I prefer the UIs of VS Code, github.com, or Gmail to any of the UIs I can think of built with "actual" UI toolkits. Maybe I like text more than the average user, though.

tonyarkles 7y ago
Heh, I think it's a matter of preferences really. Emacs is my daily driver for an editor. I access Gmail via Thunderbird instead of the web UI. I do use Github via a browser, but pretty much just for doing code reviews or creating a new repository. Branching etc all happens on the command line. Looking at my current list of open apps on this machine, it's a bit of a mixed bag: - iMessage (native) - Chrome - iTerm2 (native) - Fusion 360 (uhhh something weird, dunno) - Spotify (Electron) - XCode (native) - Emacs (native-ish, maybe GTK?) - Thunderbird (native-ish, I think it's still laid out with XUL) - Slack (Electron) - Keybase (Electron) One thing to note: most of the time I am in the city, but have a second home in a rural area. When I'm out there on a spotty tethered connection, all of the above Electron apps have to get closed because they lose their minds when there's a spotty connection. Slack in particular likes to steal focus/pop up over everything when it is in a loop trying to reconnect. Spotify gets into a weird state where the UI gets unresponsive. Keybase doesn't really complain much.
- hollerith 7y ago
  It might interest you to know that graphical Emacs on a Mac uses purely native UI APIs. No GTK. (And I wish Chrome used those native Mac UI APIs as well as Mitsuharu Emacs does.)
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    I figured it might!

icebraining 7y ago

Counterpoint: a DOM is just a tree of objects that represent a UI page/window. If you look at, say, QML, there's a DOM as well, and even if you write it in code, there's still an hierarchy of objects. I'm not sure the DOM is the problem.

tonyarkles 7y ago
That's fair! I suppose it's more that DOM+CSS has only recently really started to have broad support for more UI-oriented layout. Things like "make these N boxes all the same width, even if N changes" :)