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This is not a design opinion to me. Unless your application state can be represented as pure text, it can not be efficiently conveyed to blind users. So we forc

This is not a design opinion to me. Unless your application state can be represented as pure text, it can not be efficiently conveyed to blind users. So we force you to do that. > It would be better if the web browser world had pixel level render targets We also have escape hatches when you need pixel controls: Canvas, and webGL which can be rendered to a Canvas. The only difference is that they're not the core that HTML is based on. This is on purpose, because using Canvas should be very rare. You should embed your (rare) pixel-based rendered component into an HTML tree with appropriate non-visual markup around it to describe what it is and what it does. Pixel-level render targets are a design antipattern for most apps. Not all apps (games for example), but the vast majority of them. To me this isn't a design thing -- it's a purely practical decision. Your app state needs to be accessible to people, people need to be able to build on it, programs need to be able to parse it and manipulate it, it needs to be responsive when high-definition displays or Apple Watches come out in the future, and it needs to degrade gracefully when parts of the browser stop working. We've been able to observe for a long time that apps that are built this way are better for end-users. In the browser, text is your pixel. Of course you are welcome to build things on top of that with CSS, images, and Canvas. More to the point, I'm not saying that 95% of the time you should abandon your design and make a minimalist terminal interface -- I'm saying that for 95% of the phone apps and native apps I see, HTML would be fine. There is a pretty good chance the design someone has come up with is already representable in pure text, and they just haven't thought hard enough about how to do it. I'm not saying design everything minimalist, I'm saying your design is probably already a lot more minimalist than you think, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to separate content from pixel-positioning and style for most apps.

crimsonalucard 7y ago
>In the browser, text is your pixel. Of course you are welcome to build things on top of that with CSS, images, and Canvas. More to the point, I'm not saying that 95% of the time you should abandon your design and make a minimalist terminal interface -- I'm saying that for 95% of the phone apps and native apps I see, HTML would be fine. There is a pretty good chance the design someone has come up with is already representable in pure text, and they just haven't thought hard enough about how to do it. I'm not saying design everything minimalist, I'm saying your design is probably already a lot more minimalist than you think, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to separate content from pixel-positioning and style for most apps. This is your opinion, and your opinion deserves to be fulfilled. My opinion is that the web is a multimedia platform that can do combinatorial designs where text motion and visualizations can be combined into something like this: https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ In my opinion what you see as 95% of all user interfaces is largely a because HTML and CSS are the rendering target not the other way around. There are less games and those types of UI interfaces on web browsers because HTML + CSS is bad for doing those things. So if we have different opinions what's the best way to fulfill both? Libraries. One library for your text based philosophy and one for mine. The lower level technology should be agnostic to both of our opinions. What I don't like is having to submit myself to your design philosophy and write my canvas library on top of HTML + CSS. webassembly makes logic language agnostic on the front end. It's time to do the same for the "render target"
- danShumway 7y ago
  > into something like this Unless I'm misunderstanding, this example seems to be exactly what I'm talking about. Even in its current state, there are only 2 or 3 things on this page I can see using Canvas. Everything else is already using HTML and CSS. It's not even lazy-loading the images -- this is a static page that is dynamically generated. And yet despite ultimately being a static page, it works fine. Great even, it's responsive if I resize the browser. HTML is doing everything you would ever need here. You can use Canvas for the (optional) background animations in the deep water, Canvas (or gifs) for a few minor animations like the waves on the top. You use a very small amount of JS to update the text tracker and swap the sub to a fixed position when you hit its scroll-point. The sub is already an image being animated via CSS, so you're doing that correctly. To me, this page is the perfect example of something that has an incredibly simple tree-based UI that is nevertheless being dynamically rendered with webGL for some inexplicable reason. I'm actually a little annoyed that it doesn't currently work with JS disabled. I wouldn't expect the depth-tracker to work without Javascript, but I should still be able to at least scroll to the bottom and see all of the pictures and text. It would not be hard to make this page degrade gracefully. What do you want this page to do that isn't possible with the current state of HTML/CSS? I might be missing something, but I don't see what the complication is. > In my opinion what you see as 95% of all user interfaces is largely a because HTML and CSS are the rendering target not the other way around. I'll make a bolder claim then: 95% of native apps are just interactive documents (with a few category exceptions like games), and most native developers who claim that their interfaces couldn't be represented on the web in HTML are kidding themselves. In the majority of cases, HTML/CSS would be fine for what they're building.
  - crimsonalucard 7y ago
    That page actually goes against your point of HTML as a singular render target. You need CSS or that entire page won't look right at all. The point isn't whether or not you can do this in CSS + HTML. (Which by the way CSS + HTML is proven to be turing complete so you can actually do anything in CSS + HTML including writing a JS interpreter so you can use javascript on non-JS enabled pages) The point is to get to the above, you need to basically hack your way there. HTML + CSS is not the ideal medium to program something like that in. It would be better to have a library written over a pixel level API to construct the interfaces you see in the page rather then either hack your way through HTML and CSS or create a library of hacks on top of HTML and CSS. >I'll make a bolder claim then: 95% of native apps are just interactive documents (with a few category exceptions like games), and most native developers who claim that their interfaces couldn't be represented on the web in HTML are kidding themselves. In the majority of cases, HTML/CSS would be fine for what they're building. Sure make that claim, even if it were true nobody wants a computer to just be a platform for text based UI. Nobody wants the internet to be JUST that. People want the computer to be a universal computing platform. Games may be category but it's a huge category as no one will buy a computer that only has the capability of displaying text, they buy it for the computing potential to do anything. Heck under your logic, why even have the OS expose the pixel level api? Just have the OS expose a DOM. 95% of apps are that way so an OS that does this is perfectly fine. If you want to restrict the potential of what the internet is, then yes. If you want to expand it while keeping your design philosophy in place then the platform must expose a pixel level API and HTML and CSS must be moved to a library. It makes no sense for a lower level library to be written as a component of a higher level library, it should be reversed.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

>In the browser, text is your pixel. Of course you are welcome to build things on top of that with CSS, images, and Canvas. More to the point, I'm not saying that 95% of the time you should abandon your design and make a minimalist terminal interface -- I'm saying that for 95% of the phone apps and native apps I see, HTML would be fine. There is a pretty good chance the design someone has come up with is already representable in pure text, and they just haven't thought hard enough about how to do it. I'm not saying design everything minimalist, I'm saying your design is probably already a lot more minimalist than you think, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to separate content from pixel-positioning and style for most apps. This is your opinion, and your opinion deserves to be fulfilled. My opinion is that the web is a multimedia platform that can do combinatorial designs where text motion and visualizations can be combined into something like this: https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ In my opinion what you see as 95% of all user interfaces is largely a because HTML and CSS are the rendering target not the other way around. There are less games and those types of UI interfaces on web browsers because HTML + CSS is bad for doing those things. So if we have different opinions what's the best way to fulfill both? Libraries. One library for your text based philosophy and one for mine. The lower level technology should be agnostic to both of our opinions. What I don't like is having to submit myself to your design philosophy and write my canvas library on top of HTML + CSS. webassembly makes logic language agnostic on the front end. It's time to do the same for the "render target"

danShumway 7y ago
> into something like this Unless I'm misunderstanding, this example seems to be exactly what I'm talking about. Even in its current state, there are only 2 or 3 things on this page I can see using Canvas. Everything else is already using HTML and CSS. It's not even lazy-loading the images -- this is a static page that is dynamically generated. And yet despite ultimately being a static page, it works fine. Great even, it's responsive if I resize the browser. HTML is doing everything you would ever need here. You can use Canvas for the (optional) background animations in the deep water, Canvas (or gifs) for a few minor animations like the waves on the top. You use a very small amount of JS to update the text tracker and swap the sub to a fixed position when you hit its scroll-point. The sub is already an image being animated via CSS, so you're doing that correctly. To me, this page is the perfect example of something that has an incredibly simple tree-based UI that is nevertheless being dynamically rendered with webGL for some inexplicable reason. I'm actually a little annoyed that it doesn't currently work with JS disabled. I wouldn't expect the depth-tracker to work without Javascript, but I should still be able to at least scroll to the bottom and see all of the pictures and text. It would not be hard to make this page degrade gracefully. What do you want this page to do that isn't possible with the current state of HTML/CSS? I might be missing something, but I don't see what the complication is. > In my opinion what you see as 95% of all user interfaces is largely a because HTML and CSS are the rendering target not the other way around. I'll make a bolder claim then: 95% of native apps are just interactive documents (with a few category exceptions like games), and most native developers who claim that their interfaces couldn't be represented on the web in HTML are kidding themselves. In the majority of cases, HTML/CSS would be fine for what they're building.
- crimsonalucard 7y ago
  That page actually goes against your point of HTML as a singular render target. You need CSS or that entire page won't look right at all. The point isn't whether or not you can do this in CSS + HTML. (Which by the way CSS + HTML is proven to be turing complete so you can actually do anything in CSS + HTML including writing a JS interpreter so you can use javascript on non-JS enabled pages) The point is to get to the above, you need to basically hack your way there. HTML + CSS is not the ideal medium to program something like that in. It would be better to have a library written over a pixel level API to construct the interfaces you see in the page rather then either hack your way through HTML and CSS or create a library of hacks on top of HTML and CSS. >I'll make a bolder claim then: 95% of native apps are just interactive documents (with a few category exceptions like games), and most native developers who claim that their interfaces couldn't be represented on the web in HTML are kidding themselves. In the majority of cases, HTML/CSS would be fine for what they're building. Sure make that claim, even if it were true nobody wants a computer to just be a platform for text based UI. Nobody wants the internet to be JUST that. People want the computer to be a universal computing platform. Games may be category but it's a huge category as no one will buy a computer that only has the capability of displaying text, they buy it for the computing potential to do anything. Heck under your logic, why even have the OS expose the pixel level api? Just have the OS expose a DOM. 95% of apps are that way so an OS that does this is perfectly fine. If you want to restrict the potential of what the internet is, then yes. If you want to expand it while keeping your design philosophy in place then the platform must expose a pixel level API and HTML and CSS must be moved to a library. It makes no sense for a lower level library to be written as a component of a higher level library, it should be reversed.