3 ms·

What aspect of Figma do you mean? Placing elements on a canvas has been possible almost forever...

by onli 6y ago

have_faith 6y ago
Figma makes heavy use of WASM, WebGL and Web Workers it’s much more complicated than just rendering some shapes on a canvas with a scene graph.
- onli 6y ago
  That might change the limit on how big the UI can be, but it changes nothing fundamental. As far as I'm aware of what Figma can do (we use it at work but I use it seldom directly), you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG. It's not fundamentally different to the Pipes UI I did implement with Raphael.
  - trs8080 6y ago
    > you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG In the same way that writing a REST API is "connecting to some DB and simply exposing data via some endpoints" or building a machine learning model is "simply throwing some data at some algorithm and getting a bunch of analysis out" or devops is "simply starting some remote servers" or creating an OS is "simply writing a bootloader and then some stuff on top."
    - onli 6y ago
      No. In the way that having written UIs that go into that direction, adding refinements to them and adding performance improvements does not change the base characteristics of what has to be written. Remember, my comment was a response to the claim that something like Figma could not be done before the current frontend development complexity mania. But there is nothing in that collection of bad tools that is necessary to write a canvas based UI like that. It could have been done before and it most likely has been done before.
- alerighi 6y ago
  We have to distinguish websites from web applications. Websites have no reason to use JavaScript. They should be a collection of documents, possibly generate dynamically on the server side, but to the user HTML+CSS that can be viewed in a browser, downloaded with curl, viewed as source code, etc. Web applications have no reason to exist. Basically we are turning the browser into a JVM, a way to run code portably. But this have nothing to do with the web! It's just bytecode loaded from a remote server. What Figma, or GMail, or Google Docs has to do with a website? Nothing. These things shouldn't be implemented in a browser, it's not the right place. These problem should have been solved at the operating system level, but it was too difficult for Microsoft to agree with Apple and the open source world on a portable operating system interface to made possible universal binaries among platforms, with maybe a bytecode, maybe a way to load code from an URL. No they couldn't agree, so they took the only really open standard, the web, and bloated it, basically making it an operating system (well, Google even made it really one!), what's the point? That now most people run Windows or macOS with on top a browser (probably Chrome) into which they run 95% of the software that they use. Does this make sense? To me is a huge inefficiency, that only makes things slower, slower than they were in the 90s to me (even if we have order of magnitude more powerful hardware using the GMail web interface feels slower than what it was using Outlook on Windows 98).
  - chrononaut 6y ago
    As someone who doesn't do neither front-end nor back-end development I think this comment does the best job in this thread summarizing pitfalls I've observed as a user. Although you probably (?) want to add that OS maintainers are slowly turning their repository of available OS-level applications into walled gardens, which I could see may push some developers to currently prefer web application implementations.
    - BackBlast 6y ago
      The web is the closest we have to an open universal platform. If you want the most bang for the buck as a business in developing widely accessible software, you build a website/webapp first.
  - 6y ago

What aspect of Figma do you mean? Placing elements on a canvas has been possible almost forever...

by onli 6y ago

What aspect of Figma do you mean? Placing elements on a canvas has been possible almost forever...

Figma makes heavy use of WASM, WebGL and Web Workers it’s much more complicated than just rendering some shapes on a canvas with a scene graph.

onli 6y ago
That might change the limit on how big the UI can be, but it changes nothing fundamental. As far as I'm aware of what Figma can do (we use it at work but I use it seldom directly), you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG. It's not fundamentally different to the Pipes UI I did implement with Raphael.
- trs8080 6y ago
  > you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG In the same way that writing a REST API is "connecting to some DB and simply exposing data via some endpoints" or building a machine learning model is "simply throwing some data at some algorithm and getting a bunch of analysis out" or devops is "simply starting some remote servers" or creating an OS is "simply writing a bootloader and then some stuff on top."
  - onli 6y ago
    No. In the way that having written UIs that go into that direction, adding refinements to them and adding performance improvements does not change the base characteristics of what has to be written. Remember, my comment was a response to the claim that something like Figma could not be done before the current frontend development complexity mania. But there is nothing in that collection of bad tools that is necessary to write a canvas based UI like that. It could have been done before and it most likely has been done before.
alerighi 6y ago
We have to distinguish websites from web applications. Websites have no reason to use JavaScript. They should be a collection of documents, possibly generate dynamically on the server side, but to the user HTML+CSS that can be viewed in a browser, downloaded with curl, viewed as source code, etc. Web applications have no reason to exist. Basically we are turning the browser into a JVM, a way to run code portably. But this have nothing to do with the web! It's just bytecode loaded from a remote server. What Figma, or GMail, or Google Docs has to do with a website? Nothing. These things shouldn't be implemented in a browser, it's not the right place. These problem should have been solved at the operating system level, but it was too difficult for Microsoft to agree with Apple and the open source world on a portable operating system interface to made possible universal binaries among platforms, with maybe a bytecode, maybe a way to load code from an URL. No they couldn't agree, so they took the only really open standard, the web, and bloated it, basically making it an operating system (well, Google even made it really one!), what's the point? That now most people run Windows or macOS with on top a browser (probably Chrome) into which they run 95% of the software that they use. Does this make sense? To me is a huge inefficiency, that only makes things slower, slower than they were in the 90s to me (even if we have order of magnitude more powerful hardware using the GMail web interface feels slower than what it was using Outlook on Windows 98).
- chrononaut 6y ago
  As someone who doesn't do neither front-end nor back-end development I think this comment does the best job in this thread summarizing pitfalls I've observed as a user. Although you probably (?) want to add that OS maintainers are slowly turning their repository of available OS-level applications into walled gardens, which I could see may push some developers to currently prefer web application implementations.
  - BackBlast 6y ago
    The web is the closest we have to an open universal platform. If you want the most bang for the buck as a business in developing widely accessible software, you build a website/webapp first.
- 6y ago