Precisely. And even Win32, which is being touted in this thread as somehow far superior to the Web stack, was never designed for high DPI apps. It's far worse than the Web stack, with exact pixel hardcoding everywhere. That's why the HiDPI situation on Windows is such an inconsistent mess. Meanwhile, the Web scaled up to HiDPI so seamlessly that most people never even noticed any friction. This is the benefit of the declarative model of CSS.

Win32 was designed around DPI-independence from day one. That's why things like GetSystemMetrics exist. Unfortunately, the app developers chose not to use them.

GDI was originally designed to run on printers as well as screens, where the DPI values are completely different.

The declarative model of CSS has nothing to do with it. You can specify pixel values in CSS if you like.

> You can specify pixel values in CSS if you like.

And many (most?) do... leading to the reinterpretation of what "pixel" means in the CSS spec. Yes, CSS pixel does not mean a physical pixel on the screen.

> Win32 was designed around DPI-independence from day one. That's why things like GetSystemMetrics exist. Unfortunately, the app developers chose not to use them.

Integer pixel coordinates are right there in the most fundamental functions:

    HWND WINAPI CreateWindow(LPCTSTR lpClassName,
                             LPCTSTR lpWindowName,
                             DWORD dwStyle,
                             int x,
                             int y,
                             int nWidth,
                             int nHeight,
                             HWND hWndParent,
                             HMENU hMenu,
                             HINSTANCE hInstance,
                             LPVOID lpParam);

WPF is perfectly fine for high DPI apps and still beats all this web stuff by orders of magnitude.

CSS people still think a grid is a choice of "small" "medium" and "large" columns/rows. Haha.

> WPF is perfectly fine for high DPI apps and still beats all this web stuff by orders of magnitude.

> CSS people still think a grid is a choice of "small" "medium" and "large" columns/rows. Haha.

CSS Grid is literally Microsoft taking the WPF grid layout and porting it to the Web!

Yes, that is what I'm saying. They are not porting it because previous solutions have been just as capable.

But they did port it. That's why CSS Grid exists…

Yes, but his point is that for ages it didn't exist. Like, for 2 decades and something, was first tables, then "floats" BS.

And even now it's still not mature and supported in all browsers.

Isn't this a false dichotomy? Why not create more modern, declarative native APIs and libraries, or use them where they already exist?

> the old stuff worked just fine

> we don't need the new stuff

> how about we throw both away to shut everyone up, would that make either side happy?

How about: Take what we learn from new development so that we can improve the older, lower-level stuff, and strip away some unnecessary levels of abstraction?

Yep. I did some swift development recently and while I absolutely loved the language I was struck with how much worse the uikit APIs are compared to react.

There's nothing special about javascript the language. The nice thing about web development is that the really fast framework iteration cycles. And everyone complains about them, but as a result we have some fantastic APIs for UI development in javascript land now. (Eg, react.)

What I want to see is someone port those lovely abstractions across to native languages. For example, a port of choo[1] to swift on top of uikit would be gloriously fast, efficient, small and easy to work with.

[1] https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/choo

Because it's less effort and more likely to be successful to just improve Web implementations.

Sure, but it's also more likely to make my laptop with 16 gigs of RAM, 8 simultaneous threads and SSD feel more sluggish than the one I had 10 years ago.

Edit: I'll add, I frequently see people say that Windows XP was the best OS ever made. Why the rose-tinted glasses? It was the tail end of the era when hardware was getting faster, faster than software was getting slower.