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I'd argue that the most successful UI platform is a browser. And guess what? Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets. All it does it some bu

I'd argue that the most successful UI platform is a browser. And guess what? Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets. All it does it some button with outdated UI, few inputs nobody really uses and dropdown select suitable only for the most basic uses. Anything other built on divs with CSS and JS. And it works. So my opinion is that it's definitely solid foundations what matters. Rest will come with time from third party libraries.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
The browser is successful not because it has a solid foundation but because a ridiculous amount of engineering effort has been put into it. Most of the "beautiful foundation" you see are all post 2012. You young'uns don't remember the days before HTML5 and CSS3. Before npm and PWAs and the "cloud native" nonsense. Adobe Flash anyone? Silverlight? Before WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU unity (yes that game engine) even required a browser plugin. Web browsers were often severely incompatible with each other and web standards were a suggestion at best. Now, it's bad form to slander dead people so I will just say that the nice kind folks at apple under the orders of their dear leader did their best to destroy as much of the pre-2012 web as possible by gatekeeping the iPhone browser and using their market power to strong arm web technology.
- setr 4y ago
  I can’t figure out if you are for post-2012 web tech or against it
  - baq 4y ago
    The answer is clearly ‘Yes’. The problem is we’re in 2011 again, except chrome is the new flash and safari is the ie6.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I remember the buggy adobe svg plugin c.2000! That is an extension you had to install as an .exe to view some subset of svg!
jenadine 4y ago
People dont't simply use CSS and JS to build UI for web apps, they use web frameworks that comes with their share of supported components. And there are also a bunch of these framework to choose from, they come and go.
stakhanov 4y ago
> Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets [...] And it works. I beg to differ. When the economics of doing UIs shifted away from APIs like Windows Forms, Carbon, JavaFX towards the current trend of doing everything in a browser, it brought with it some serious regression in how powerful and user friendly those GUIs are. With Microsoft-level resources, you can take on a mammoth engineering task like implementing Office or Visual Studio in the browser. But if you are resource-constrained in the way that most developers are, you cut corners and drop functionality, and that's where we are today with browser GUIs ...not that any of that matters if all you're doing is CRUD, like most people are. But one shouldn't judge technology by its easiest, most boring, and degenerate use cases.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  I beg your pardon, but why do you consider CRUD 'degenerate'?
  - stakhanov 4y ago
    A "degenerate special case" of a general concept, in mathematics [1], is a special case that no longer has the complexities that motivated the need for that concept in the first place. Consider, for example, the evolution of a CRUD app that was first written in, say, the late 80s for OS/400, using an interaction style where it's all full screen forms rendered as text that you fill out with your keyboard, then submit. Say, you rewrote that app in the 00s in Windows Forms but using the same interaction design, and then again in the 20s as a browser-based app. If you look at the evolution of what happened to UI technology through the lens of that app, you won't feel like anything is amiss in 2023, but you're also kind of missing the point of having a GUI in the first place, as opposed to, say, a text terminal. Whenever I hear "all I need is a textedit and a button" from a web developer, I kind of assume that this is what informs their viewpoint. If you instead look at the evolution of UI technology through the lens of an app like Photoshop, it will immediately be obvious to you what it is that GUIs uniquely have to offer that, for example, text terminals can't, and why rewriting such a UI in a browser is anything but trivial. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics)
croes 4y ago
The browser is more equivalent to the .Net framework and the JVM. The GUI part was started by bootstrap and similar tools and shifted to React, Vue etc.
imbnwa 4y ago
You forgot the part where the browser competently handles i18n and a11y, the later I especially wager none of these frameworks come close to
moonchrome 4y ago
>Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets What are you talking about ? HTML and CSS is full of widget libraries, it's the best cross platform widget library out there. Ease of deployment + reach is the driving force behind improving the platform, but at the present nothing in Rust can even compare to something like Material UI. And let's not even go into stuff like date range picker components and shit where companies probably spent millions in engineering effort to get them right (eg. AirBnB) .
- coderedart 4y ago
  Is a date range picker that hard to implement?
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    You wouldn't think so, but I've seen a lot of bad ones.

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

The browser is successful not because it has a solid foundation but because a ridiculous amount of engineering effort has been put into it. Most of the "beautiful foundation" you see are all post 2012. You young'uns don't remember the days before HTML5 and CSS3. Before npm and PWAs and the "cloud native" nonsense. Adobe Flash anyone? Silverlight? Before WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU unity (yes that game engine) even required a browser plugin. Web browsers were often severely incompatible with each other and web standards were a suggestion at best. Now, it's bad form to slander dead people so I will just say that the nice kind folks at apple under the orders of their dear leader did their best to destroy as much of the pre-2012 web as possible by gatekeeping the iPhone browser and using their market power to strong arm web technology.

setr 4y ago
I can’t figure out if you are for post-2012 web tech or against it
- baq 4y ago
  The answer is clearly ‘Yes’. The problem is we’re in 2011 again, except chrome is the new flash and safari is the ie6.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I remember the buggy adobe svg plugin c.2000! That is an extension you had to install as an .exe to view some subset of svg!

jenadine 4y ago

People dont't simply use CSS and JS to build UI for web apps, they use web frameworks that comes with their share of supported components. And there are also a bunch of these framework to choose from, they come and go.

stakhanov 4y ago

> Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets [...] And it works. I beg to differ. When the economics of doing UIs shifted away from APIs like Windows Forms, Carbon, JavaFX towards the current trend of doing everything in a browser, it brought with it some serious regression in how powerful and user friendly those GUIs are. With Microsoft-level resources, you can take on a mammoth engineering task like implementing Office or Visual Studio in the browser. But if you are resource-constrained in the way that most developers are, you cut corners and drop functionality, and that's where we are today with browser GUIs ...not that any of that matters if all you're doing is CRUD, like most people are. But one shouldn't judge technology by its easiest, most boring, and degenerate use cases.

vincnetas 4y ago
I beg your pardon, but why do you consider CRUD 'degenerate'?
- stakhanov 4y ago
  A "degenerate special case" of a general concept, in mathematics [1], is a special case that no longer has the complexities that motivated the need for that concept in the first place. Consider, for example, the evolution of a CRUD app that was first written in, say, the late 80s for OS/400, using an interaction style where it's all full screen forms rendered as text that you fill out with your keyboard, then submit. Say, you rewrote that app in the 00s in Windows Forms but using the same interaction design, and then again in the 20s as a browser-based app. If you look at the evolution of what happened to UI technology through the lens of that app, you won't feel like anything is amiss in 2023, but you're also kind of missing the point of having a GUI in the first place, as opposed to, say, a text terminal. Whenever I hear "all I need is a textedit and a button" from a web developer, I kind of assume that this is what informs their viewpoint. If you instead look at the evolution of UI technology through the lens of an app like Photoshop, it will immediately be obvious to you what it is that GUIs uniquely have to offer that, for example, text terminals can't, and why rewriting such a UI in a browser is anything but trivial. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy_(mathematics)

croes 4y ago

The browser is more equivalent to the .Net framework and the JVM. The GUI part was started by bootstrap and similar tools and shifted to React, Vue etc.

imbnwa 4y ago

You forgot the part where the browser competently handles i18n and a11y, the later I especially wager none of these frameworks come close to

moonchrome 4y ago

>Browser does not have a fuck ton of well supported widgets What are you talking about ? HTML and CSS is full of widget libraries, it's the best cross platform widget library out there. Ease of deployment + reach is the driving force behind improving the platform, but at the present nothing in Rust can even compare to something like Material UI. And let's not even go into stuff like date range picker components and shit where companies probably spent millions in engineering effort to get them right (eg. AirBnB) .

coderedart 4y ago
Is a date range picker that hard to implement?
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  You wouldn't think so, but I've seen a lot of bad ones.