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Right. Prior to CSS, it used to be that literally anyone could (and should!) write HTML: web-pages were just simple documents (by design) using only paragraph-

Right. Prior to CSS, it used to be that literally anyone could (and should!) write HTML: web-pages were just simple documents (by design) using only paragraph-flow content with inline objects (like images, Java applets, ActiveX on Windows), and appearance was directly set inline with <font>, <small>, etc. This is fine for web-page documents, but not web-page applications, and it turns out that defining a layout system for a medium as flexible as a web-browser viewport is very, very hard. It's the same thing with desktop software: previously it was perfectly acceptable for a VB6 application to consist entirely of fixed-size windows with controls placed at fixed-positions, with no resize logic - or to handle re-flow when the text changes, or high-DPI for that matters. Users, today, have much higher expectations, and now it's now basically impossible for a "citizen programmer" to meet the expectations of normal users, and I feel this is a bad trend for everyone: we all love to grimmace at a giant Excel VBA macro doing 20 things at once that still somehow works, but the person or company that actually has that macro really is better-off than someone without it. ------- The complex layout systems in modern UI frameworks (like WPF/XAML, Cocoa Touch, etc) are converging with CSS (or vice-versa, depending on your experience) in their expressiveness - which necessitates complete abstraction-away from fixed-layout WYSIWYG systems that were the key component of the democratization of desktop computers since the late-1980s, and while HTML was never WYSIWYG an average person could still immediately understand what `<font color="">` did - and could immediately see how their fixed-layout VBA Form would look when it runs. Unfortunately I don't have a solution to this problem: citizen-programmers are going to need a WYSIWYG fixed-layout design tool, but such a tool is fundamentally incompatible with end-user expectations - and essential things like accessibility and device-portability. I guess we'll be stuck with proprietary, half-arsed, "low-code"/"no-code" tools for a long while.

6510 4y ago
Even longer ago, with fixed width fonts and fixed size screens things were even better. On C64 the keyboard had --- ||| characters to draw line with corner characters T splits and + . The empty space was filled with space characters so you could just move around your cursor. Someone with no previous experience could draw boxes and make cool looking menus. Could stick a few sprites on it with absolute positioning. Supporting all kinds of screen sizes is a dumb idea but we are stuck with it. If you also want to support different languages the screen is mostly empty with logograms and the languageswithgiantwords stick out of the boxes. We are pretty lucky English is a reasonable middle ground.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > Supporting all kinds of screen sizes is a dumb idea No, it isn't a dumb idea. > If you also want to support different languages the screen is mostly empty with logograms and the languageswithgiantwords stick out of the boxes. ...what you're describing only happens if a page/screen/layout is designed without reflow in-mind. Otherwise it will look fine and natural. Every layout system that supports text reflow will support forced hyphenation for dealing with zeverylongcompoundwords in German and other languages.
  - 6510 4y ago
    If you make a painting it is suppose to be viewed at a specific size. If you specifically create it to work at different sizes (like a logo) you suffer enormous constraints. I took a picture one time of a boat on the horizon under a beautiful sky with a few distant seagulls that, while small, were absolutely necessary for the composition. It looked stunning full screen, one could almost smell the ocean. When slightly scaled down the clouds turned uninteresting, the boat lost all detail, the waves and the gulls just vanished. One could certainly argue that there is no need for such things and that an interface can be (or should be?) equally usable on any kind of screen. To me it stops being art at that point. It reminds me of The Night watch, they "reflow" the painting by cutting parts of. People thought one can just do that. Or perhaps they showed it's not a problem, I dunno. It's not for me.

6510 4y ago

Even longer ago, with fixed width fonts and fixed size screens things were even better. On C64 the keyboard had --- ||| characters to draw line with corner characters T splits and + . The empty space was filled with space characters so you could just move around your cursor. Someone with no previous experience could draw boxes and make cool looking menus. Could stick a few sprites on it with absolute positioning. Supporting all kinds of screen sizes is a dumb idea but we are stuck with it. If you also want to support different languages the screen is mostly empty with logograms and the languageswithgiantwords stick out of the boxes. We are pretty lucky English is a reasonable middle ground.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
> Supporting all kinds of screen sizes is a dumb idea No, it isn't a dumb idea. > If you also want to support different languages the screen is mostly empty with logograms and the languageswithgiantwords stick out of the boxes. ...what you're describing only happens if a page/screen/layout is designed without reflow in-mind. Otherwise it will look fine and natural. Every layout system that supports text reflow will support forced hyphenation for dealing with zeverylongcompoundwords in German and other languages.
- 6510 4y ago
  If you make a painting it is suppose to be viewed at a specific size. If you specifically create it to work at different sizes (like a logo) you suffer enormous constraints. I took a picture one time of a boat on the horizon under a beautiful sky with a few distant seagulls that, while small, were absolutely necessary for the composition. It looked stunning full screen, one could almost smell the ocean. When slightly scaled down the clouds turned uninteresting, the boat lost all detail, the waves and the gulls just vanished. One could certainly argue that there is no need for such things and that an interface can be (or should be?) equally usable on any kind of screen. To me it stops being art at that point. It reminds me of The Night watch, they "reflow" the painting by cutting parts of. People thought one can just do that. Or perhaps they showed it's not a problem, I dunno. It's not for me.