5 ms·

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do re

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an analog (e.g. long press is right-click in mobile UI), but not everywhere and not always done the same way. Mobile has some inconsistency; the Web has a good bit. The modern has plenty of its own UI/UX things--URLs and the Back button for the win, dev tools/view source are awesome, and certain cool things can come from services not living entirely on your device. Something like hiding clutter at the cost of discoverability is a win for many people. Still think it's interesting to compare and think about what can be usefully brought forward from the past.

pcurve 7y ago
25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.
- z3t4 7y ago
  I recently spent one week making a dropdown menu. Then I spent another week making it possible to use it with keyboard only and with a screen reader. There are actually standards on how a dropdown menu is supposed to work. But no easy way to implement one. Dropdowns are however very bad UI because it hides info and you need to click or move the mouse to certain places to see more. A unique feature on the web is the scroll to see more. Using the mouse wheel. So instead of putting info in one screen hidden behind menus, tabs etc, you just put All info in one looooong scrollable page. This works great when information is presented like in a book, eg. you read from top to bottom and rarely jump back and forth. So the challenge is to present the functionality in a way so that the user does not have to scroll back and forth to reach it. Key presses or gestures could instead be used to switch between different scrollable screens/pages. And each view should have an unique URL so you can link to it.
- goatlover 7y ago
  There is the menu element, but I guess it was just meant to be semantic and didn't really catch on. I think JS killed the adding of more GUI elements to HTML. Developers prefer their libraries. It's weird how things progress in three steps forward, two backward kind of way. The web has certainly illustrated that in many ways.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    IMHO it's closer to one step forward, two steps backward. There are plenty of other articles on HN about how annoying and unusable the "modern Web" has become.
- chii 7y ago
  > Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? because HTML was never designed to be a application interface, and I don't see a menu-bar nor dropdown as necessary for a document display. What's needed for the web is a common and standarized (i.e., browser provided) library for application UI that's distinct from the existing HTML markup. They should not mix, and if you have a document (rather than a web-app), you use HTML, but if you intend to write an application UI, you would use that library. I forsee something like WASM compiled QT or some such to be the beginnings of such an api.
  - guggle 7y ago
    back then, I thought XUL could be this standarized lib for GUI. Alas... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL/XUL_Reference https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Just like XHTML was supposed to be, oh well. I think WASM will bring "Flash" back, just in a different form, and now everyone will be happy because it is standard.
    - chii 7y ago
      flash was only bad due to the inherent vulnerabilities and capabilities that browsers werent expected to have (such as being able to write to disk directly). WASM can be sandboxed properly, unlike flash.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        So much that you can easily compile Heartbleed into WASM, great sandboxing.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Just wait a little. Soon there will be a movement for UI consistency and they will reinvent a lot of stuff Apple and MS did about UI in the 90s. Just give it a fancy new name. You can see this on the iPad. Suddenly you have multiple windows, keyboard, just in slightly different form.
- egypturnash 7y ago
  And absolutely no documentation on how it works. I've turned the multiple windows stuff off on the iPad because it's so damn inconsistent and incomprehensible.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    I have tried to figure it out a few times but it's so unintuitive I always forget after a few days.
  - runjake 7y ago
    Documentation? Here you go. Under the “Basics” section. It’s how I learned it. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados

pcurve 7y ago

25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.

z3t4 7y ago
I recently spent one week making a dropdown menu. Then I spent another week making it possible to use it with keyboard only and with a screen reader. There are actually standards on how a dropdown menu is supposed to work. But no easy way to implement one. Dropdowns are however very bad UI because it hides info and you need to click or move the mouse to certain places to see more. A unique feature on the web is the scroll to see more. Using the mouse wheel. So instead of putting info in one screen hidden behind menus, tabs etc, you just put All info in one looooong scrollable page. This works great when information is presented like in a book, eg. you read from top to bottom and rarely jump back and forth. So the challenge is to present the functionality in a way so that the user does not have to scroll back and forth to reach it. Key presses or gestures could instead be used to switch between different scrollable screens/pages. And each view should have an unique URL so you can link to it.
goatlover 7y ago
There is the menu element, but I guess it was just meant to be semantic and didn't really catch on. I think JS killed the adding of more GUI elements to HTML. Developers prefer their libraries. It's weird how things progress in three steps forward, two backward kind of way. The web has certainly illustrated that in many ways.
- userbinator 7y ago
  IMHO it's closer to one step forward, two steps backward. There are plenty of other articles on HN about how annoying and unusable the "modern Web" has become.
chii 7y ago
> Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? because HTML was never designed to be a application interface, and I don't see a menu-bar nor dropdown as necessary for a document display. What's needed for the web is a common and standarized (i.e., browser provided) library for application UI that's distinct from the existing HTML markup. They should not mix, and if you have a document (rather than a web-app), you use HTML, but if you intend to write an application UI, you would use that library. I forsee something like WASM compiled QT or some such to be the beginnings of such an api.
- guggle 7y ago
  back then, I thought XUL could be this standarized lib for GUI. Alas... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL/XUL_Reference https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Just like XHTML was supposed to be, oh well. I think WASM will bring "Flash" back, just in a different form, and now everyone will be happy because it is standard.
  - chii 7y ago
    flash was only bad due to the inherent vulnerabilities and capabilities that browsers werent expected to have (such as being able to write to disk directly). WASM can be sandboxed properly, unlike flash.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      So much that you can easily compile Heartbleed into WASM, great sandboxing.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Just wait a little. Soon there will be a movement for UI consistency and they will reinvent a lot of stuff Apple and MS did about UI in the 90s. Just give it a fancy new name. You can see this on the iPad. Suddenly you have multiple windows, keyboard, just in slightly different form.

egypturnash 7y ago
And absolutely no documentation on how it works. I've turned the multiple windows stuff off on the iPad because it's so damn inconsistent and incomprehensible.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I have tried to figure it out a few times but it's so unintuitive I always forget after a few days.
- runjake 7y ago
  Documentation? Here you go. Under the “Basics” section. It’s how I learned it. https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados