Re:Marko – An isomorphic UI framework similar to Vue
by jancsika on Sunday August 20, 2017 @09:45AM
(#15058382)
Oh, I almost forgot-- if you were making a cross-platform application for MacOS, Windows, and X11, you would spend a lot of time on at least one of those platforms trying to figure out some crazy workaround for a bad UI decision.
For example, for a file dialog under Windows and MacOS a call to the native libraries is made to get a native dialog widget. But in Linux of the late 1990s/early 2000s there was no such thing as a native dialog. So some tk developer coded their own file dialog.
Let's say you started in a deeply nested directory and you wanted to climb out. You see a button that goes one level up the directory tree. Great. You click that button and on Linux now the window shrinks because its width is set to be as wide as the directory being shown. So you couldn't do multiple clicks in a row to climb up the tree without moving the mouse to the left for each click.
You might be able to dig into the internals and muck around to get that dialog to have a better UI. But then you notice that the window menus in Linux-- unlike the ones on MacOS or Windows 95-- don't toggle the menu display on click. They only display on click. Not sure about Gnome 1, but Gnome 2 window menus definitely toggled on click. If you want that standard behavior now you've got to dig into yet another implementation-specific codebase for your tcl/tk installation. And since you're mucking around inside the implementation there is no guarantee that what you change will still work when you upgrade to a newer version.
If Firefox rolled their own weirdo file dialog on Linux and required an extension to get something that looked better, you can bet every new release would be met with complaints and sneers about just that. Yet whenever people bring up whateverTk it's some kind of antediluvian paradise.
For example, for a file dialog under Windows and MacOS a call to the native libraries is made to get a native dialog widget. But in Linux of the late 1990s/early 2000s there was no such thing as a native dialog. So some tk developer coded their own file dialog.
Let's say you started in a deeply nested directory and you wanted to climb out. You see a button that goes one level up the directory tree. Great. You click that button and on Linux now the window shrinks because its width is set to be as wide as the directory being shown. So you couldn't do multiple clicks in a row to climb up the tree without moving the mouse to the left for each click.
You might be able to dig into the internals and muck around to get that dialog to have a better UI. But then you notice that the window menus in Linux-- unlike the ones on MacOS or Windows 95-- don't toggle the menu display on click. They only display on click. Not sure about Gnome 1, but Gnome 2 window menus definitely toggled on click. If you want that standard behavior now you've got to dig into yet another implementation-specific codebase for your tcl/tk installation. And since you're mucking around inside the implementation there is no guarantee that what you change will still work when you upgrade to a newer version.
If Firefox rolled their own weirdo file dialog on Linux and required an extension to get something that looked better, you can bet every new release would be met with complaints and sneers about just that. Yet whenever people bring up whateverTk it's some kind of antediluvian paradise.