Ask HN: What are weird and/or novel ways to do web UIs?

So it works in firefox and chrome for me on windows. Not sure, I have pretty vanilla setup.

You can go on and follow the technical developement, but you will inevitably reach a point where people stopped understanding the whole stack below them and instead started to cobble together new abstractions from the things they did – until the next generation came and abstracted that. We all know this – it is far easier to add onto something existing, than removing or changing existing things that are just not good enough for the things we want.

So at a certain point you stop doing the rational and efficient thing to solve a problem, but react to more or less organically grown structures and go a extra mile to solve problems you might have never had if you included these capabilities in the existing layers below. But the existing layers below were written ages ago in languages you hate by obscure circles talking on mailing lists, so we don't even bother. The resulting Rube-Goldberg-Machine is weird in that sense: nobody rational who understands all the layers would plan it like it is from the ground up if they had the choice.

It surprises many people to learn that the tone isn’t “always there” and that signalling happens with the exchange to create it. This includes checking billing status and other things.

These systems are so robust we mostly take them for granted.

Are they really just protecting their archane methods because they see that as protecting their income and any simplification a threat to that?

Or is it more tribal, cult like adherence to an overbloated way of creating web UIs?

Or is it people don't want to learn yet another tool and they're just resigned to the fact the these are the tools they have because really, they don't get to decide that anyway, their employer does?

Or is it people don't like being reminded that actually, they're "forced" to use these tools (which they perhaps wouldn't if it wasn't mandated), but because the workplace uses them, they use them, so the existence of other options while accurate is a painful reminder of their own limited autonomy to individually decide the tools they use for their work?

Is the same cultish zealotry seen in other languages and frameworks or is it just (what compiles to) ECMAscript and Web UI/state frameworks?

I can't think of a good reason for depending on thousands of libraries to aid you in laying out and presenting a document, if you are using a language and a platform specifically designed for that purpose.

And they never kept track of their dependencies in the first place. That's the job of some build tool. Whatever it pulls in is fine.

Now we can see the two big vendors Google and Apple trying to slip in features that help their apps or platforms. This is partly why some people worry about the dominance of Chrome; once it's totally dominant, Google can e.g. interfere with adblockers without worrying about losing users to the competition.

I love it; this is great! I imagine somewhere in the world today, a witty instructor is teaching a computer basics or CIS 101 course and using something like your phrase above as the definition for the term "world wide web". lol :-)

...and a protocol for inter-object communication. That's probably the most important part, because that's what creates most of the complexity and security holes today. There is no end to this in sight.

Alan Kay warned web developers about this in 1997:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

Nobody listened. The majority of web devs still don't get it. (Can't wait for the arrogant replies here.) We ended up reinventing and re-implementing "internet objects" in the shittiest way possible.

  * build your own runtime
  * running in your own window
  * using your new protocol
  * using a sane UI language

The Web is much more than a document delivery or archiving system, it is hypertext and the boundary between hypertext and apps is fluid. Is Wikipedia an app or a collection of articles? Is HN an app or a collection of comments and links? There is no precise boundary.

When Berners-Lee invented the Web he was heavily inspired by Hypercard [1], an app development kit based on linking cards together.

Web development is "weird" because the web tries to be device- and platform-agnostic. The web works on large widescreens, laptops, smartphones, in text mode or on a Braille display.

Other technologies that have been used to develop UI apps from the beginning, such as Adobe Flash, assume that the display is a kind of fixed screen on which you can draw, with little or no accessibility and linking in mind.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

So it's really cool to see hyper card for real this time!

Oh! Of course! I presume you can also inject JS into Google Slides itself. Hmm... I'll see if I can make a simple game then, when I'm bored again.

I think you just upped my motivation even higher to be in IT.

[0] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/convert-powerpoint-presentat...

Why did you try to talk her out of it? What was the gain? Feeling superior?

These do not compare things such as sequential read, sequential write, random read, random write, temperature, MTBF, Backblaze outage percentages (statistical relevant), type of storage (SLC, MLC, AMLC, QLC, TLC, etc), chipset used, and so on, and so forth.

I'm scared shitless to check or use the battprices.com as it probably does not do anything like the above either. Which, in case of batteries, can cause something arguably more severe than bad performance or data loss: fire.

Don't use websites like these. Instead, read reviews and support websites which release quality reviews.

I miss a page like this for Canada.

In Germany, where I'm originally from, we have geizhals.de for product and price comparison that works a lot like these pages you linked and has been around for ages.

They have an English version you can check out here: https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=nb (this links directly to the Laptop section so you can check out their filtering capabilities).

Here's their listing of price per TB for SSDs which is very much alike the diskprices.com page you linked: https://skinflint.co.uk/?cat=hdssd&sort=r#productlist

This just makes me waste my time compared to a table where I can sort/filter by different criteria.

Most of the time, "creative" visualizations tend to actually obscure meaning, or worse, mislead viewers.

Recommended reading: Show me the numbers by Stephen Few (his blog is also great: http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/)

Interestingly, Blazor seems to be reviving the whole idea. With SignalR, it is actually not completely insane to handle events with the equivalent of code-behind.

It took just one slip of the finger to...

Not so fast. As a web developer we still had to contend with the horror of IE5/6/7 for a few more years, and initially WITHOUT anything resembling the utility of something like JQuery!

Not entirely. Sometimes they were replaced by applets, which are just native application wrapped in a thin layer of html. This causes its own set of problems. At one place I worked (a large government agency), a critical spreadsheet ran as an applet which was only compatible with IE9. They couldn't upgrade anyone's PC's because they risked an auto-update of IE, which would break the ability to run that app.

At another job, a certain time tracking application ran as an applet, requiring a specific version of the jvm to be installed.

Deploying an application that runs in the browser using the browser's native capabilties - js, html, css works great. Using it to embed an applet doubles the misery, as in the short term management thinks they've purchased a portable, always-compatible "web-app", while what they've done is bought a native binary they can no longer properly provision their workstations to run.