Re:Obvious and possible software innovations
by jacobsenscott on Sunday June 20, 2021 @01:57AM
(#27567519)
I've never seen a web UI that couldn't be built, and built better, in an hour with an old school drag and drop gui builder. Unfortunately the web was built on markup, and markup is a terrible way to define a UI. There is really no way to make a good gui builder for html/css, so we are stuck with literally the worst possible way to build UIs today. CSS is 24 years old, and nobody has figured out a sane way to use it yet. We've gone from inline styles to "semantic" to BEM, and we've come full circle to what are basically inline styles (tailwind) and they all suck. Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today. In many ways the history of building UIs in HTML is just people trying to find ways to mimic a frames/tables layout without using frames and tables.
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Re:Obvious and possible software innovations
by ironmagma on Sunday June 20, 2021 @02:07AM
(#27567569)
There are a ton of effective drag and drop GUI builders for HTML/CSS: Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and Plasmic to name a few, and that's just the current generation (see also: Dreamweaver et al.).
> Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today
How? CSS and HTML can do practically everything frames could do (the only thing I can think of that doesn't apply is independent histories). There are a lot of different technologies at your disposal -- grid, which is probably the most intuitive; flex box; or just `position: fixed` divs.
Are those building a GUI? Or just a website? As far as I know they’re mostly about markup.
Re:Obvious and possible software innovations
by ironmagma on Sunday June 20, 2021 @03:06AM
(#27567839)
That's a strange distinction to make. Websites are a type of GUIs. You can build some pretty complicated things without JavaScript, but if you need JS, then yes, most of them support it in some form or another, Plasmic probably being the most sophisticated.
Calling websites GUI is a bit streched. A phone can be called a computer but the computations it does are limited to data collecting. Websites also could have good UI (even GUI) but most are limited to (again) data collection and the UI is the same like the one between Ice age humans and first domesticated animals.
Re:Obvious and possible software innovations
by ironmagma on Sunday June 20, 2021 @05:17AM
(#27568413)
I think you're overcomplicating this; the meaning of these words is in the acronyms themselves. What's a UI? A user interface -- any layer that goes between the user and some machine. What's a GUI? A user interface that is graphical, or: a layer that uses graphics to go between the user and a machine. Since websites use graphics (pixels, on a screen), and they sit between the user and a computer, they are GUIs.
The whole HTML-ization of GUIs is crazy... It's like "ok, let's make a language that represents semantics of documents and leaves most of the presentation to the tools, so we could concentrate on content and not focus too much on irrelevant details of presentation" - "ok, cool idea, now let's take this language and use it to build pixel-precision GUIs that have no semantic content at all". Ugh, talk about right too for the job!
Re:Obvious and possible software innovations
by la_fayette on Sunday June 20, 2021 @02:07AM
(#27567570)
Is a gui tool really faster or better then directly writing the code? It is like using a cli vs using a gui... propably a hybrid approach would be best...