4 ms·

You're incoherent. You started complaining that all you want it is the ability to have custom layout & drawing logic and HTML doesn't let you escape the tree.

by slver 5y ago

You're incoherent. You started complaining that all you want it is the ability to have custom layout & drawing logic and HTML doesn't let you escape the tree. And currently you've given up this entire premise, and you're on a loop whining about how FOSS and professional UI libraries that have custom layout & drawing logic, which WORKS JUST FINE IN EVERY BROWSER take hundreds of kb (which is nothing) and some of them cost money (which is absolutely irrelevant). You wanted to express "arbitrary relationships". This requires libraries implementing "arbitrary logic" with access to the presentation layer. You got it. Now you're whining about the fact these libraries exist.

dmitriid 5y ago
> You're incoherent. I am very coherent Ok. Let's be very coherent. Let's talk about one single thing. Not so long ago Twitter redesigned their website. Mind you, Twitter is far from being a complex app UI-wise. It's basically text plus images. All they did was re-implement infinite scrolling using a well-known paradigm called a virtual list (or a virtual table). Here's a small video of their original result: https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN Note: I implemented a similar functionality in C++ Builder circa 2004 and in Qt circa 2005. This entire functionality is either available right out of the box, or will take a first-year CS student a day or two to implement by following a simple tutorial (because virtual lists are a thing available in all UI kits since probable early 80s). It took Twitter close to a year to fix this functionality. Now, tell me: why is it that such a powerful platform: a) doesn't have this functionality out of the box b) requires a company the size of Twitter almost a year to implement somewhat satisfactorily c) why didn't Twitter just "go ahead and download a package" that implements this trivial primitive functionality that is so readily available, once again, everywhere else. From here on we can discuss all the other trivial and primitive things that require you to depend on someone to spend untold man-powers to implement them in the "so powerful a platform". And from there on we can move on to discussing why these trivial and primitive things require orders of magnitudes more resources to run to do a fraction of a fraction of the things available, you know, everywhere else. How's that for coherency? Edit: In a comment elsewhere I actually linked to a nice example. The Web is such a powerful platform that you can't even animate shadows without thinking hard and long about causing page repaints: https://tobiasahlin.com/blog/how-to-animate-box-shadow/ https://tobiasahlin.com/blog/how-to-animate-box-shadow/ MacOS did shadows almost 20 years ago on hardware that's probably 100 times less powerful than now.
- slver 5y ago
  So an app had a bug and almost a year later they fixed it. You're right. This scenario never happened outside the web. /s Partial rendering of lists/tables is trivial when the items are not dependent on one another (flow) or you have fixed or easy to compute height (assuming vertical scroll). When that height is determined by thousands of variables, bugs can happen, and what platform you use doesn't matter. But I suspect Twitter's issue is elsewhere entirely and both you and I are forced to speculate POINTLESSLY I MIGHT ADD, on a fixed bug we can't debug the cause of. And saying Twitter is "just text and images" is both terrible oversimplification (it has text in multiple styles, also videos, polls, retweet panels, info cards etc. etc. etc.), and just sounds ignorant. "Just text"? Do you have a clue how varied and complicated multilingual Unicode is at all, not to mention mixed RTL and LTR and so on. You get to say "just text" if you're rendering the visible range of ASCII in a monospace font only. You did it more easily in your toy scenario most likely because your toy scenario had LESS complexity, not because HTML has less capability. You see, there's a reason why people often embed HTML in their apps to show so-called "rich text" in it. It's something that's not trivial to achieve at all in your typical UI kit (beyond basics like color, font-family and size). And unfortunately your coherency remains low, as you're still arguing about things that have nothing to do with your initial thesis that HTML doesn't allow you to do what you want. If HTML has a problem, is that it does too much, not too little. If you take Qt "circa 2005" and try to replicate the exact visual presentation of Twitter.com you'd quickly realize how much HTML gives you that Qt wouldn't. In fact, Qt's own rich text support is a tiny, tiny subset of HTML. Oh, by the way, you don't get to use Qt. You only get to use whatever comes with your OS, because BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS you're very filesize conscious, and "hundreds of kilobytes" was too much for a UI library to use in your web app. Well Qt is several megabytes. You forgot you were whining about kilobytes, right. Low coherence.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > So an app had a bug... terrible oversimplification... your toy scenario... Life is so easy when you bury your head in the sand and pretend problems don't exist. > trivial when the items are not dependent on one another (flow) or you have fixed or easy to compute height Funny how "so powerful a platform" makes this "trivial and easy" only if you babysit it and give it rigid fixed dimensions. > because BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS you're very filesize conscious, and "hundreds of kilobytes" was too much for a UI library A modern browser is about 10 million lines of code, give or take. That's ~20% of the entirety of Windows 10. That's the size of Windows NT, and only slightly smaller than the size of Android. And this "powerful system" still can't display more than very primitive UI elements, and needs additional megabytes of code to do the most trivial of UI things. Oh, and it requires magnitudes more resources to display all that, and needs ridiculous things like "oh you must have fixed height" to do the most trivial of things. But sure, to you it's "so powerful". That betrays your ignorance, and I'm tired of this conversation. Adieu.

by slver 5y ago

dmitriid 5y ago

> You're incoherent. I am very coherent Ok. Let's be very coherent. Let's talk about one single thing. Not so long ago Twitter redesigned their website. Mind you, Twitter is far from being a complex app UI-wise. It's basically text plus images. All they did was re-implement infinite scrolling using a well-known paradigm called a virtual list (or a virtual table). Here's a small video of their original result: https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN https://grumpy.website/post/0RQvmdNmN Note: I implemented a similar functionality in C++ Builder circa 2004 and in Qt circa 2005. This entire functionality is either available right out of the box, or will take a first-year CS student a day or two to implement by following a simple tutorial (because virtual lists are a thing available in all UI kits since probable early 80s). It took Twitter close to a year to fix this functionality. Now, tell me: why is it that such a powerful platform: a) doesn't have this functionality out of the box b) requires a company the size of Twitter almost a year to implement somewhat satisfactorily c) why didn't Twitter just "go ahead and download a package" that implements this trivial primitive functionality that is so readily available, once again, everywhere else. From here on we can discuss all the other trivial and primitive things that require you to depend on someone to spend untold man-powers to implement them in the "so powerful a platform". And from there on we can move on to discussing why these trivial and primitive things require orders of magnitudes more resources to run to do a fraction of a fraction of the things available, you know, everywhere else. How's that for coherency? Edit: In a comment elsewhere I actually linked to a nice example. The Web is such a powerful platform that you can't even animate shadows without thinking hard and long about causing page repaints: https://tobiasahlin.com/blog/how-to-animate-box-shadow/ https://tobiasahlin.com/blog/how-to-animate-box-shadow/ MacOS did shadows almost 20 years ago on hardware that's probably 100 times less powerful than now.

slver 5y ago
So an app had a bug and almost a year later they fixed it. You're right. This scenario never happened outside the web. /s Partial rendering of lists/tables is trivial when the items are not dependent on one another (flow) or you have fixed or easy to compute height (assuming vertical scroll). When that height is determined by thousands of variables, bugs can happen, and what platform you use doesn't matter. But I suspect Twitter's issue is elsewhere entirely and both you and I are forced to speculate POINTLESSLY I MIGHT ADD, on a fixed bug we can't debug the cause of. And saying Twitter is "just text and images" is both terrible oversimplification (it has text in multiple styles, also videos, polls, retweet panels, info cards etc. etc. etc.), and just sounds ignorant. "Just text"? Do you have a clue how varied and complicated multilingual Unicode is at all, not to mention mixed RTL and LTR and so on. You get to say "just text" if you're rendering the visible range of ASCII in a monospace font only. You did it more easily in your toy scenario most likely because your toy scenario had LESS complexity, not because HTML has less capability. You see, there's a reason why people often embed HTML in their apps to show so-called "rich text" in it. It's something that's not trivial to achieve at all in your typical UI kit (beyond basics like color, font-family and size). And unfortunately your coherency remains low, as you're still arguing about things that have nothing to do with your initial thesis that HTML doesn't allow you to do what you want. If HTML has a problem, is that it does too much, not too little. If you take Qt "circa 2005" and try to replicate the exact visual presentation of Twitter.com you'd quickly realize how much HTML gives you that Qt wouldn't. In fact, Qt's own rich text support is a tiny, tiny subset of HTML. Oh, by the way, you don't get to use Qt. You only get to use whatever comes with your OS, because BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS you're very filesize conscious, and "hundreds of kilobytes" was too much for a UI library to use in your web app. Well Qt is several megabytes. You forgot you were whining about kilobytes, right. Low coherence.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > So an app had a bug... terrible oversimplification... your toy scenario... Life is so easy when you bury your head in the sand and pretend problems don't exist. > trivial when the items are not dependent on one another (flow) or you have fixed or easy to compute height Funny how "so powerful a platform" makes this "trivial and easy" only if you babysit it and give it rigid fixed dimensions. > because BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS you're very filesize conscious, and "hundreds of kilobytes" was too much for a UI library A modern browser is about 10 million lines of code, give or take. That's ~20% of the entirety of Windows 10. That's the size of Windows NT, and only slightly smaller than the size of Android. And this "powerful system" still can't display more than very primitive UI elements, and needs additional megabytes of code to do the most trivial of UI things. Oh, and it requires magnitudes more resources to display all that, and needs ridiculous things like "oh you must have fixed height" to do the most trivial of things. But sure, to you it's "so powerful". That betrays your ignorance, and I'm tired of this conversation. Adieu.