5 ms·

What do you mean by "ridiculously bloated"?

by adflux 5y ago

dmitriid 5y ago
The very nature of HTML and CSS which are designed to display some text and maybe a few images make them ridiculously unsuited for literally anything else. You as much as glance at a web page, and it causes a repaint and reflow of the page. Everything else stems from that.
- BackBlast 5y ago
  HTML+CSS is a layout system that has been refined and heavily used in many screen sizes for several decades now. Try to find an equivalent system that works from 4/8k down to 320px width in any native system. I mean, there ARE downsides to using web tech, but as a flexible layout system that can gracefully describe very large ranges of targets I have not found it's equal.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Try to find an equivalent system that works from 4/8k down to 320px width in any native system. You probably mean literally every native system. Because it's not like native toolkits didn't exist on the same systems as HTML+CSS. > a flexible layout system that can There's significantly more that's required of UI than just layout. And HTML+CSS are horrendously bad for anything beyond a static page of text with images.
    - BackBlast 5y ago
      You just keep repeating that claim and don't bother to present an argument. There are plenty of effective dynamic web pages that are not painful to create as a counter point to your claim. For layouts, I've used various toolkits including Qt, Java AWT and SWING, and Visual Basic way back when. Creating a GUI that scales gracefully on these, in my experience, is time consuming and highly difficult. Most everyone favors static layouts because of the challenges. Learning responsive design on a web page takes a bit of time but it has the tools to reasonably manage a variety of layouts on a wide range of screens. I would even accept an individual native system's layout manager as a counter argument of something that is at least competitive. It really isn't an easy problem.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > You just keep repeating that claim and don't bother to present an argument. These facts are obvious to anyone who has seen anything else besides just HTML+CSS. Adding a simple box shadow on an element will trigger reflow in most browser engines [1] Efficiently animating anything that as much as breathes at layout is impossible. Efficiently displaying anything beyond a few hundred elements on a page? Equally impossible (and there are no virtual lists on the web). But the actual argument is this: given "the most advanced and powerful layout system in the world that has no parallels anywhere else, it's so unique", why is it that most CSS frameworks struggle to implement anything beyond the most basic of controls (buttons, links, may be tabs)? > Creating a GUI that scales gracefully on these, in my experience, is time consuming and highly difficult. Ah yes. "Scales". Because this is the area that only HTML and CSS have to deal with. Because, you know, resizing windows didn't ever exist since the earliest days of GUIs. However, being able to work at different sizes isn't what "scaling a GUI" means, or should mean. Desktop apps have been able to work at different sizes for close to 40 years now. [1] https://csstriggers.com/box-shadow https://csstriggers.com/box-shadow
caslon 5y ago
Here's a good example! Open up this page in your web browser; not the site the thread is linking to, just the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937 Opening it up, fresh, it's taking 49.9MB of memory for me. For a tab I've had open for a while, of the same page, it's doing 60MB. And that's despite it not being a "web application": it's barely a web page! So here I am, doing exactly what everyone claims I should be doing, and using a web browser for my web content. And one of the most spartan sites on the internet, Hacker News, has mildly-active threads that take up 60MB of memory. For the tab. Not for the browser, for the individual tab. The best Electron application I've ever came across launched with 100MB of memory consumption and pegs a CPU core. That's not even getting into how nearly every single Electron application puts 150MB+ on your hard disk, because that in particular isn't incredibly relevant.
- adflux 5y ago
  I (and I think most users) don't care about how much memory an individual webpage uses, as long as it feels fast. I'm sure there are many like you who want applications to be frugal with memory and cpu consumptions, but I think most users don't really give a damn.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    They care when the computer slows down and the battery drains faster.
  - caslon 5y ago
    I personally like having battery life and the ability to multitask. I don't think it's something that only non-technical users want, or even something particularly rare. Surely most users like their phones lasting longer on a single charge, given that's sort of the root of the discussion.
    - 411111111111111 5y ago
      Memory consumption of that level has no noticeable impact on battery life. There are bloated web apps that should be improved for sure, but they also exist with "native" languages. The issue has always been runtime computations, PWAs are perfomant if you keep them low. I wrote myself an ebook and webnovel reader PWA which tracks progress by pixels and percentage amongst other things. There is no noticeable difference between fbreader (native) and this angular app. I get the same amount of drain per hour as I repeatedly verified when I switched.

What do you mean by "ridiculously bloated"?

by adflux 5y ago

What do you mean by "ridiculously bloated"?

The very nature of HTML and CSS which are designed to display some text and maybe a few images make them ridiculously unsuited for literally anything else. You as much as glance at a web page, and it causes a repaint and reflow of the page. Everything else stems from that.

BackBlast 5y ago
HTML+CSS is a layout system that has been refined and heavily used in many screen sizes for several decades now. Try to find an equivalent system that works from 4/8k down to 320px width in any native system. I mean, there ARE downsides to using web tech, but as a flexible layout system that can gracefully describe very large ranges of targets I have not found it's equal.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Try to find an equivalent system that works from 4/8k down to 320px width in any native system. You probably mean literally every native system. Because it's not like native toolkits didn't exist on the same systems as HTML+CSS. > a flexible layout system that can There's significantly more that's required of UI than just layout. And HTML+CSS are horrendously bad for anything beyond a static page of text with images.
  - BackBlast 5y ago
    You just keep repeating that claim and don't bother to present an argument. There are plenty of effective dynamic web pages that are not painful to create as a counter point to your claim. For layouts, I've used various toolkits including Qt, Java AWT and SWING, and Visual Basic way back when. Creating a GUI that scales gracefully on these, in my experience, is time consuming and highly difficult. Most everyone favors static layouts because of the challenges. Learning responsive design on a web page takes a bit of time but it has the tools to reasonably manage a variety of layouts on a wide range of screens. I would even accept an individual native system's layout manager as a counter argument of something that is at least competitive. It really isn't an easy problem.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > You just keep repeating that claim and don't bother to present an argument. These facts are obvious to anyone who has seen anything else besides just HTML+CSS. Adding a simple box shadow on an element will trigger reflow in most browser engines [1] Efficiently animating anything that as much as breathes at layout is impossible. Efficiently displaying anything beyond a few hundred elements on a page? Equally impossible (and there are no virtual lists on the web). But the actual argument is this: given "the most advanced and powerful layout system in the world that has no parallels anywhere else, it's so unique", why is it that most CSS frameworks struggle to implement anything beyond the most basic of controls (buttons, links, may be tabs)? > Creating a GUI that scales gracefully on these, in my experience, is time consuming and highly difficult. Ah yes. "Scales". Because this is the area that only HTML and CSS have to deal with. Because, you know, resizing windows didn't ever exist since the earliest days of GUIs. However, being able to work at different sizes isn't what "scaling a GUI" means, or should mean. Desktop apps have been able to work at different sizes for close to 40 years now. [1] https://csstriggers.com/box-shadow https://csstriggers.com/box-shadow

caslon 5y ago

Here's a good example! Open up this page in your web browser; not the site the thread is linking to, just the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27576937 Opening it up, fresh, it's taking 49.9MB of memory for me. For a tab I've had open for a while, of the same page, it's doing 60MB. And that's despite it not being a "web application": it's barely a web page! So here I am, doing exactly what everyone claims I should be doing, and using a web browser for my web content. And one of the most spartan sites on the internet, Hacker News, has mildly-active threads that take up 60MB of memory. For the tab. Not for the browser, for the individual tab. The best Electron application I've ever came across launched with 100MB of memory consumption and pegs a CPU core. That's not even getting into how nearly every single Electron application puts 150MB+ on your hard disk, because that in particular isn't incredibly relevant.

adflux 5y ago
I (and I think most users) don't care about how much memory an individual webpage uses, as long as it feels fast. I'm sure there are many like you who want applications to be frugal with memory and cpu consumptions, but I think most users don't really give a damn.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  They care when the computer slows down and the battery drains faster.
- caslon 5y ago
  I personally like having battery life and the ability to multitask. I don't think it's something that only non-technical users want, or even something particularly rare. Surely most users like their phones lasting longer on a single charge, given that's sort of the root of the discussion.
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    Memory consumption of that level has no noticeable impact on battery life. There are bloated web apps that should be improved for sure, but they also exist with "native" languages. The issue has always been runtime computations, PWAs are perfomant if you keep them low. I wrote myself an ebook and webnovel reader PWA which tracks progress by pixels and percentage amongst other things. There is no noticeable difference between fbreader (native) and this angular app. I get the same amount of drain per hour as I repeatedly verified when I switched.