3 ms·

A problem is that none of the arguments you are offering are bad, logically. It feels very appealing to think you can build a system that would solve "laying o

by taeric 3y ago

A problem is that none of the arguments you are offering are bad, logically. It feels very appealing to think you can build a system that would solve "laying out text" for all time. For me, what they lack is evidence that stands any stronger than video games. Specifically, I've played different games on various screen sizes and orientations that largely work as you would expect. They are not perfect, of course, but they work better than most web pages seem to. And they do that, largely, without the same reliance on something like CSS that web pages need. More, it isn't like we weren't laying out billboard displays long before the web came to be. Nor is it realistic that billboards have at all the same concerns that a pocket sized phone will have. At large, you shouldn't even use the same fonts between those options. Heck, taken farther, a billboard can hold a slogan, that is about it. This would be the same as if you tried to use HTML/CSS to make a poster for a movie. Which, sure, you can make a bit of an effort with it. I just don't see it being any better than letting a designer or probably an automated system layout several standard sizes with the standard type in the standard locations. Pulling it in, I'll be delighted to get proven wrong and find that we have converged to a great abstraction for laying out content. I, of course, do not /know/ that it can't be done. I do pull my hair out at the amount of effort people will go to in order to have the system layout a set of divs, when most designs could probably have done a lot of that math up front and worked with far fewer nested elements than we seem to typically see.

auggierose 3y ago
Good layout is simple. But can it be flexibly done without a good sense for abstraction and math? No. I mean, just look at the hot shit that is Tailwind, that's what people come up with while fighting abstraction. CSS was a mess, but together with React is now the best language for building GUIs. You can build up any abstraction you want in React, even <FullScreen><Center>Hello World!</Center></FullScreen> In fact, that's what I did over the weekend for my Electron desktop application, writing my own little library of components, including tabs and treeviews, using only CSS and React and no third-party libraries apart from that. You already have been proven wrong. You are just not ready to accept the proof.
- taeric 3y ago
  Where was I proven wrong? Does that example compile down to something that isn't several dozen nested divs using react? As stated in my post, happy to be proven wrong if that is the case. I am fairly far removed from a lot of this nowadays, and it would not be the first time that the world moved on without my noticing rapidly. (My favorite example of this is just how good battery technology has gotten. A decade ago, a battery powered lawn mower was a laughable idea. )
  - danShumway 3y ago
    Does it matter if it does compile down to that? A lot of abstractions are complicated under the hood -- the high-level graphics formats that are used in engines are under the hood doing a ton of complicated tradeoffs and tricks to try and get the same sprites to render on Metal, Vulkan, OpenGL, and DirectX. I tend to avoid over-abstraction when I can, but I still have to ask -- it a problem that those abstractions are complicated under the hood if they work for the developers that use them? Pipewire is pretty complicated under the hood to maintain compatibility with multiple setups; does that mean we can't have a universal audio interface for Linux and every device should be programming separately for ALSA and PulseAudio?
    - taeric 3y ago
      Fair that I don't think "what it compiles to" should be near as important as I was holding it. CSS, though, did have a goal at the start to be a lot more approachable than what we have, though. User stylesheets were a huge selling point in early pitches that I recall. That is flat not possible with how we have things nowadays. And I also think it would be fair to lay a lot of the blame on just how many divs so many designs explode things into.
      - danShumway 3y ago
        I mean... I do agree with this: > And I also think it would be fair to lay a lot of the blame on just how many divs so many designs explode things into. That could be a longer conversation but what I try to get across to designers is that the DOM is your interface, the DOM is not the tool you use to build your interface, the DOM should be a user-facing representation of application state, and incidentally you can also represent that visually. So agreed, I hate it when I open dev tools and I just some completely incomprehensible mountain of divs. That being said: > That is flat not possible with how we have things nowadays. I do this. I maintain custom stylesheets for websites I visit, it's very possible. It's one of the things I love about the web, I love that I can have website-specific stylesheets in Firefox without even installing an addon. I've set up hacks when I was trying to use the browser less to do grayscale effects across websites I didn't want to visit. It was a tiny amount of code and it mostly just worked, and I really couldn't do something equivalent with other platforms. And OK, sure, maybe that's just me and it's unfair for me to say it's easy. I work with CSS a lot, I am generally proficient at it. So that's maybe a bad standard for me to have -- what about the people who don't want to work with CSS a ton until they understand it? Well... do they use uBlock Origin? There are a host of browser extensions that modify stylesheets on the fly to do complicated things that help make the web better. uBlock Origin would be a lot worse without CSS. And there's an on-ramp for that kind of thing too, HN has honestly a pretty bad user-interface as far as the DOM is concerned. But I have a number of one-line filters in uBlock that are basically just CSS rules that help make the website better. It's not perfect and it should be better, but I'm left looking at the alternatives again -- no other platform gives me as much control over 3rd-party user interfaces as the web. And for the most part it just works, websites like Facebook are the exception and very often, particularly for indie websites, I can open up the DOM and mess with things and fix problems. It's a problem that it's not more accessible and I am not shaming anyone who struggles with it, but I don't think it's impossible. It's a normal thing for me to do. Maybe I'm biased on that, but I think it's very feasible for especially programmers to learn to override 3rd-party interfaces on the web. My main critique of the web is that there should be more abstractions for non-programmers and UI designers to work with that doesn't require them to drop into a programming language when overriding things. Reader Mode for Firefox is a step in the right direction, although it could be a lot better. The browser controls for font sizes are good. There's a lot further that browsers could go to improve that situation.
danShumway 3y ago
> For me, what they lack is evidence that stands any stronger than video games. Specifically, I've played different games on various screen sizes and orientations that largely work as you would expect. They are not perfect, of course, but they work better than most web pages seem to. And they do that, largely, without the same reliance on something like CSS that web pages need. Video game interfaces are a ton of work, and porting between different control schemes and devices is a ton of work and that's why a lot of games don't do it. Look at the work required to handle devices like the Steam deck and the amount of work Valve has put into trying to make mouse-controlled games usable on the device. It's not easy, it's significantly more work than building for the web. Of course it's helped by the fact that Valve does have general abstracted concepts of input that games can hook into that are shared between different controllers. Modern games don't do input per-controller, they use abstraction libraries like SDL that are designed to allow them handle a lot of different input schemes with a single codebase. And even that is a crapshoot, if you're playing indie titles on a PC you are going to be rolling the dice on whether Xbox controllers and Dualshock controllers are supported or whether only one of them works. I like that when I use the web, even weird keyboards still type into webpages. We still don't have a standardized way to do controller rebindings in games -- Valve's Steam Input works by emulating a second controller for games that aren't using Valve input APIs and pretending to press the buttons the game expects to see. So even with all of the advantages of cross-platform frameworks, the games industry still doesn't have a great track record for building games across devices. You're pointing out that there exist games that do build separate interfaces for different devices. Sure. And agreed, when devs put in the extra work, you can have great results that are far better than the average website. The difference is that basically every website works on my phone. Games aren't even close to that level of compatibility and most teams don't have the resources or time to put in the work to support every device and control scheme. The world of games is exactly what we don't want on the web, because if having a website interface for mobile and for desktop means that everyone needs to design and program two separate interfaces using two separate languages, we will have about the same number of websites on both mobile and desktop as we have games on both mobile and desktop -- ie, very, very few of them. It's a blessing for compatibility that engines like Unity and Godot allow targeting multiple platforms and form-factors with a single codebase. I wish I had to work less to get that same level of abstraction in my video game interfaces. And all of this is before we even get into all of the other problems of game interfaces -- the all-too-common lack of ability to do anything with text sizes, the lack of accessibility controls, the inability to resize windows in or out of games. My goodness do I not want my web pages to act like video games, that would be a miserable experience. It's not uncommon for me to see video games that literally won't allow changing resolutions without restarting the game. Imagine if your browser forced you to close and re-open the webpage in order to resize your window. ---- > It feels very appealing to think you can build a system that would solve "laying out text" for all time. We have not built a system that can solve laying out text for all time. That system doesn't exist and can't be built, it is impossible. That's exactly what we're saying: we are trying to build a system that does the best possible job of universally solving that problem, but it's incredibly difficult and necessarily results in complexity and tradeoffs. But the only belief more naive than thinking we can have one universal layout system for everything is the belief that we don't need a universal layout system and that it's possible to reduce user needs into a finite list of use-cases that can be individually supported. That reduction isn't possible, the use-cases for end users are arbitrarily large and constantly growing and it is not possible for anyone to sit down and build a single list of formats that need to be supported on the web. That's just fantasy, people are too diverse. I use both a 1920x1080 monitor and a 3840x2160 touchscreen monitor hooked up to the same computer. Every single website I visit handles both, fluidly, when switching windows between them. A lot of games have no idea what to do and a nontrivial number of native apps struggle with it as well. But the web works, and then people show up like, "well, I shouldn't need support that." Well, I'm glad you're forced to use CSS then because I know what the web would look like if you weren't forced to.

by taeric 3y ago

auggierose 3y ago

Good layout is simple. But can it be flexibly done without a good sense for abstraction and math? No. I mean, just look at the hot shit that is Tailwind, that's what people come up with while fighting abstraction. CSS was a mess, but together with React is now the best language for building GUIs. You can build up any abstraction you want in React, even <FullScreen><Center>Hello World!</Center></FullScreen> In fact, that's what I did over the weekend for my Electron desktop application, writing my own little library of components, including tabs and treeviews, using only CSS and React and no third-party libraries apart from that. You already have been proven wrong. You are just not ready to accept the proof.

taeric 3y ago
Where was I proven wrong? Does that example compile down to something that isn't several dozen nested divs using react? As stated in my post, happy to be proven wrong if that is the case. I am fairly far removed from a lot of this nowadays, and it would not be the first time that the world moved on without my noticing rapidly. (My favorite example of this is just how good battery technology has gotten. A decade ago, a battery powered lawn mower was a laughable idea. )
- danShumway 3y ago
  Does it matter if it does compile down to that? A lot of abstractions are complicated under the hood -- the high-level graphics formats that are used in engines are under the hood doing a ton of complicated tradeoffs and tricks to try and get the same sprites to render on Metal, Vulkan, OpenGL, and DirectX. I tend to avoid over-abstraction when I can, but I still have to ask -- it a problem that those abstractions are complicated under the hood if they work for the developers that use them? Pipewire is pretty complicated under the hood to maintain compatibility with multiple setups; does that mean we can't have a universal audio interface for Linux and every device should be programming separately for ALSA and PulseAudio?
  - taeric 3y ago
    Fair that I don't think "what it compiles to" should be near as important as I was holding it. CSS, though, did have a goal at the start to be a lot more approachable than what we have, though. User stylesheets were a huge selling point in early pitches that I recall. That is flat not possible with how we have things nowadays. And I also think it would be fair to lay a lot of the blame on just how many divs so many designs explode things into.
    - danShumway 3y ago
      I mean... I do agree with this: > And I also think it would be fair to lay a lot of the blame on just how many divs so many designs explode things into. That could be a longer conversation but what I try to get across to designers is that the DOM is your interface, the DOM is not the tool you use to build your interface, the DOM should be a user-facing representation of application state, and incidentally you can also represent that visually. So agreed, I hate it when I open dev tools and I just some completely incomprehensible mountain of divs. That being said: > That is flat not possible with how we have things nowadays. I do this. I maintain custom stylesheets for websites I visit, it's very possible. It's one of the things I love about the web, I love that I can have website-specific stylesheets in Firefox without even installing an addon. I've set up hacks when I was trying to use the browser less to do grayscale effects across websites I didn't want to visit. It was a tiny amount of code and it mostly just worked, and I really couldn't do something equivalent with other platforms. And OK, sure, maybe that's just me and it's unfair for me to say it's easy. I work with CSS a lot, I am generally proficient at it. So that's maybe a bad standard for me to have -- what about the people who don't want to work with CSS a ton until they understand it? Well... do they use uBlock Origin? There are a host of browser extensions that modify stylesheets on the fly to do complicated things that help make the web better. uBlock Origin would be a lot worse without CSS. And there's an on-ramp for that kind of thing too, HN has honestly a pretty bad user-interface as far as the DOM is concerned. But I have a number of one-line filters in uBlock that are basically just CSS rules that help make the website better. It's not perfect and it should be better, but I'm left looking at the alternatives again -- no other platform gives me as much control over 3rd-party user interfaces as the web. And for the most part it just works, websites like Facebook are the exception and very often, particularly for indie websites, I can open up the DOM and mess with things and fix problems. It's a problem that it's not more accessible and I am not shaming anyone who struggles with it, but I don't think it's impossible. It's a normal thing for me to do. Maybe I'm biased on that, but I think it's very feasible for especially programmers to learn to override 3rd-party interfaces on the web. My main critique of the web is that there should be more abstractions for non-programmers and UI designers to work with that doesn't require them to drop into a programming language when overriding things. Reader Mode for Firefox is a step in the right direction, although it could be a lot better. The browser controls for font sizes are good. There's a lot further that browsers could go to improve that situation.

danShumway 3y ago

> For me, what they lack is evidence that stands any stronger than video games. Specifically, I've played different games on various screen sizes and orientations that largely work as you would expect. They are not perfect, of course, but they work better than most web pages seem to. And they do that, largely, without the same reliance on something like CSS that web pages need. Video game interfaces are a ton of work, and porting between different control schemes and devices is a ton of work and that's why a lot of games don't do it. Look at the work required to handle devices like the Steam deck and the amount of work Valve has put into trying to make mouse-controlled games usable on the device. It's not easy, it's significantly more work than building for the web. Of course it's helped by the fact that Valve does have general abstracted concepts of input that games can hook into that are shared between different controllers. Modern games don't do input per-controller, they use abstraction libraries like SDL that are designed to allow them handle a lot of different input schemes with a single codebase. And even that is a crapshoot, if you're playing indie titles on a PC you are going to be rolling the dice on whether Xbox controllers and Dualshock controllers are supported or whether only one of them works. I like that when I use the web, even weird keyboards still type into webpages. We still don't have a standardized way to do controller rebindings in games -- Valve's Steam Input works by emulating a second controller for games that aren't using Valve input APIs and pretending to press the buttons the game expects to see. So even with all of the advantages of cross-platform frameworks, the games industry still doesn't have a great track record for building games across devices. You're pointing out that there exist games that do build separate interfaces for different devices. Sure. And agreed, when devs put in the extra work, you can have great results that are far better than the average website. The difference is that basically every website works on my phone. Games aren't even close to that level of compatibility and most teams don't have the resources or time to put in the work to support every device and control scheme. The world of games is exactly what we don't want on the web, because if having a website interface for mobile and for desktop means that everyone needs to design and program two separate interfaces using two separate languages, we will have about the same number of websites on both mobile and desktop as we have games on both mobile and desktop -- ie, very, very few of them. It's a blessing for compatibility that engines like Unity and Godot allow targeting multiple platforms and form-factors with a single codebase. I wish I had to work less to get that same level of abstraction in my video game interfaces. And all of this is before we even get into all of the other problems of game interfaces -- the all-too-common lack of ability to do anything with text sizes, the lack of accessibility controls, the inability to resize windows in or out of games. My goodness do I not want my web pages to act like video games, that would be a miserable experience. It's not uncommon for me to see video games that literally won't allow changing resolutions without restarting the game. Imagine if your browser forced you to close and re-open the webpage in order to resize your window. ---- > It feels very appealing to think you can build a system that would solve "laying out text" for all time. We have not built a system that can solve laying out text for all time. That system doesn't exist and can't be built, it is impossible. That's exactly what we're saying: we are trying to build a system that does the best possible job of universally solving that problem, but it's incredibly difficult and necessarily results in complexity and tradeoffs. But the only belief more naive than thinking we can have one universal layout system for everything is the belief that we don't need a universal layout system and that it's possible to reduce user needs into a finite list of use-cases that can be individually supported. That reduction isn't possible, the use-cases for end users are arbitrarily large and constantly growing and it is not possible for anyone to sit down and build a single list of formats that need to be supported on the web. That's just fantasy, people are too diverse. I use both a 1920x1080 monitor and a 3840x2160 touchscreen monitor hooked up to the same computer. Every single website I visit handles both, fluidly, when switching windows between them. A lot of games have no idea what to do and a nontrivial number of native apps struggle with it as well. But the web works, and then people show up like, "well, I shouldn't need support that." Well, I'm glad you're forced to use CSS then because I know what the web would look like if you weren't forced to.