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You're putting words into my mouth I didn't say: The "modern web stack" has an incredibly high ceiling wrt how complicated it can be. It's floor isn't particu

by ffsm8 2y ago

You're putting words into my mouth I didn't say: The "modern web stack" has an incredibly high ceiling wrt how complicated it can be. It's floor isn't particularly complicated however, and definitely not higher then the equivalent software with the native APIs from the 90s. You had buttons, inputs, text boxes. Pre-2k UI APIs were extremely limited. Did we even have hover in windows 95/98 or MacOS 9.0? The first time I've seen that was more towards 2010 then 2000 - windows XP/Vista and MacOSX, but it's been a long time since then > No, it really is not. What you're describing is some simple form, as if 90s UIs were constrained to that. Please provide an example then. I sure as hell can't think of one and googling didn't provide me with anything but that.

ale42 2y ago
> Did we even have hover in windows 95/98? Hover how? Changing the appearance of a control when the mouse passes over it? Or having a tooltip appearing? Both can definitely be implemented quite easily. For the tooltip, I just checked on Delphi 2 (which I was using on Win95 ages ago) and it had the Hint and ShowHint properties (as the current VCL/LCL). > Pre-2k UI APIs were extremely limited. But that was largely enough for most GUIs. Nowadays people are putting a full browser (Electron) to create an interface with a few buttons and a progress bar. I'm thinking of an actual application, a relatively famous SD card writing program which weighs something like 200 MB. Make it with native GUI controls and it takes 50 kB (maybe even less) and will not eat the RAM and CPU of the users. Moreover, people are doing fancy GUIs, with the result that no two application look the same, totally confusing some users (Windows itself is a mess, since Windows 8).
- ffsm8 2y ago
  The tooltip hover is equivalent with the title attribute in hmtl5, so that once again as trivial as you can get. The original comment made it sound like they wanted something else to happen. The resource inefficency is a completely different argument. That's true, but has no bearing on how complicated the APIs supposedly are. Same with the coherence between applications. That's an issue entirely unrelated to the original claim which was just false. Completely off topic, but... If you're on windows , use Rufus instead if balena etcher. And if you're on Linux/MacOS... dd works great, just make an alias with tab completion for devices/image
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >That's true, but has no bearing on how complicated the APIs supposedly are. Same with the coherence between applications. That's an issue entirely unrelated to the original claim which was just false. That's like your opinion, man. First, it's not the invidual APIs themselves, it's several layers of APIs, and combinations thereof. In traditional desktop UIs you just placed widgets together in a form/panel, hooked events, and wrote your application - normally all in the same language and with a single bundle of APIs from your lib (e.g. the Delphi API, the QT API, MS's API). In web dev (I do both), it's an endless layer upon layer of cruft. Even just the browser UI base layer alone has HTML, CSS, JS, the DOM, SVG, Web Components and shadow DOMs, and several other items besides. Then there are the differences and incompatibilities between engines, between desktop and mobile, and so on. Then there's the pre-processing of all those, JS (or typescript), bundlers stuff like Webpack, minimization and map files, then there are Frameworks like Next/React/Angular/Vue, and different varieties. We haven't even touched the backend of those, written in the same (Node) or different languages, and with its own layers added.
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      I don't think it's possible to end this debate unless one of you finally names an example. Please provide a screenshot or at least a name of an UI/application from before 2000 that's not braindead easy to implement with pure html/trivial css and simple click handlers. If you can provide one, I'll yield to your point. Otherwise you're just high on nostalgia and comparing today's complexities caused by a vastly bigger scope to yesteryears simple realities, where multi-platform, i18n, animations, dynamic rerendering, etc pretty much wasn't a thing... entirely If you remove all these features, you end with a simple html file with inline css. And that's easier then it was in the 90s.
      - coldtea 2y ago
        >Please provide a screenshot or at least a name of an UI/application from before 2000 that's not braindead easy to implement with pure html/trivial css and simple click handlers. I'm not sure what exactly you think "UI/applications from before 2000" looked like and were. You do know that, e.g. Word, Excel, Photoshop, Logic, WinAmp, Paint, Framemaker, 3ds Max, Final Draft, Lotus Domino/Agenda, Visio, QuickBooks, Cinema 4D, Encarta, Dreamweaver, ACDSee, Real Player, Outlook, AIM, ICQ, FL Studio, Maya, WinRar, WinZip, InDesign, Quark Xpress, Cubase, and countless others, commercial and freeware, including full featured KDE and Gnome DEs were made before 2000, right?
mike_hearn 2y ago
There were definitely many issues with Win32 that HTML has fixed, but the controls available in Windows 98 were significantly more numerous and featureful than what HTML5 offers, even today. You could certainly react to mouse hovers. It also had: • Tree view controls • Table views, with draggable, resizable and sortable headers • Image list views • Menu bars (something HTML will probably never have!) • Context menus • Embeddable file explorer views • A rich text editor control that wasn't plagued with weird formatting and cursor movement bugs • Embeddable Word/Excel/PowerPoint if you needed more than that • Date/time pickers (something HTML didn't get until 2014 and I never see any real app use it) • A calendar widget • Tab views • Toolbars • Wizards/task dialogs There's some docs here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/individual-control-info https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/ind... To get these many of these on the web you need to import large third party frameworks, because HTML5 doesn't offer them out of the box. So apps are all very inconsistent.

by ffsm8 2y ago

ale42 2y ago

> Did we even have hover in windows 95/98? Hover how? Changing the appearance of a control when the mouse passes over it? Or having a tooltip appearing? Both can definitely be implemented quite easily. For the tooltip, I just checked on Delphi 2 (which I was using on Win95 ages ago) and it had the Hint and ShowHint properties (as the current VCL/LCL). > Pre-2k UI APIs were extremely limited. But that was largely enough for most GUIs. Nowadays people are putting a full browser (Electron) to create an interface with a few buttons and a progress bar. I'm thinking of an actual application, a relatively famous SD card writing program which weighs something like 200 MB. Make it with native GUI controls and it takes 50 kB (maybe even less) and will not eat the RAM and CPU of the users. Moreover, people are doing fancy GUIs, with the result that no two application look the same, totally confusing some users (Windows itself is a mess, since Windows 8).

ffsm8 2y ago
The tooltip hover is equivalent with the title attribute in hmtl5, so that once again as trivial as you can get. The original comment made it sound like they wanted something else to happen. The resource inefficency is a completely different argument. That's true, but has no bearing on how complicated the APIs supposedly are. Same with the coherence between applications. That's an issue entirely unrelated to the original claim which was just false. Completely off topic, but... If you're on windows , use Rufus instead if balena etcher. And if you're on Linux/MacOS... dd works great, just make an alias with tab completion for devices/image
- coldtea 2y ago
  >That's true, but has no bearing on how complicated the APIs supposedly are. Same with the coherence between applications. That's an issue entirely unrelated to the original claim which was just false. That's like your opinion, man. First, it's not the invidual APIs themselves, it's several layers of APIs, and combinations thereof. In traditional desktop UIs you just placed widgets together in a form/panel, hooked events, and wrote your application - normally all in the same language and with a single bundle of APIs from your lib (e.g. the Delphi API, the QT API, MS's API). In web dev (I do both), it's an endless layer upon layer of cruft. Even just the browser UI base layer alone has HTML, CSS, JS, the DOM, SVG, Web Components and shadow DOMs, and several other items besides. Then there are the differences and incompatibilities between engines, between desktop and mobile, and so on. Then there's the pre-processing of all those, JS (or typescript), bundlers stuff like Webpack, minimization and map files, then there are Frameworks like Next/React/Angular/Vue, and different varieties. We haven't even touched the backend of those, written in the same (Node) or different languages, and with its own layers added.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    I don't think it's possible to end this debate unless one of you finally names an example. Please provide a screenshot or at least a name of an UI/application from before 2000 that's not braindead easy to implement with pure html/trivial css and simple click handlers. If you can provide one, I'll yield to your point. Otherwise you're just high on nostalgia and comparing today's complexities caused by a vastly bigger scope to yesteryears simple realities, where multi-platform, i18n, animations, dynamic rerendering, etc pretty much wasn't a thing... entirely If you remove all these features, you end with a simple html file with inline css. And that's easier then it was in the 90s.
    - coldtea 2y ago
      >Please provide a screenshot or at least a name of an UI/application from before 2000 that's not braindead easy to implement with pure html/trivial css and simple click handlers. I'm not sure what exactly you think "UI/applications from before 2000" looked like and were. You do know that, e.g. Word, Excel, Photoshop, Logic, WinAmp, Paint, Framemaker, 3ds Max, Final Draft, Lotus Domino/Agenda, Visio, QuickBooks, Cinema 4D, Encarta, Dreamweaver, ACDSee, Real Player, Outlook, AIM, ICQ, FL Studio, Maya, WinRar, WinZip, InDesign, Quark Xpress, Cubase, and countless others, commercial and freeware, including full featured KDE and Gnome DEs were made before 2000, right?

mike_hearn 2y ago

There were definitely many issues with Win32 that HTML has fixed, but the controls available in Windows 98 were significantly more numerous and featureful than what HTML5 offers, even today. You could certainly react to mouse hovers. It also had: • Tree view controls • Table views, with draggable, resizable and sortable headers • Image list views • Menu bars (something HTML will probably never have!) • Context menus • Embeddable file explorer views • A rich text editor control that wasn't plagued with weird formatting and cursor movement bugs • Embeddable Word/Excel/PowerPoint if you needed more than that • Date/time pickers (something HTML didn't get until 2014 and I never see any real app use it) • A calendar widget • Tab views • Toolbars • Wizards/task dialogs There's some docs here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/individual-control-info https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/ind... To get these many of these on the web you need to import large third party frameworks, because HTML5 doesn't offer them out of the box. So apps are all very inconsistent.