Re:Ask HN: What's your biggest issue with HTML?
by solardev on Sunday October 09, 2022 @01:15PM
(#33143171)
...that it still exists.
God, I wish we just had a better language for the Web altogether. Something with sane UI primitives that automatically translate into platform API calls (i.e. you say <button>, the OS renders a button based on its own UI guidelines).
Some days I'm still nostalgic for XML + XSLT, which is like a super strict but super powerful alternative to HTML + CSS. You define the structure however you like, using a schema of your choosing, and then use XSLT to define the output, transformations, and styling. Instead, we get kludges like React trying to shoehorn their own abstractions into a million autogenerated nested <div>s because the DOM is the DOM, and having to build a UI lib on top of that, once per project per company per platform. It sucks!
HTML is a blank piece of paper force-fed into a 90s-style typewriter. Modern UIs are composed out of layers of abstractions that vaguely signal intent. The two are not a good pairing :(
God, I wish we just had a better language for the Web altogether. Something with sane UI primitives that automatically translate into platform API calls (i.e. you say <button>, the OS renders a button based on its own UI guidelines).
Some days I'm still nostalgic for XML + XSLT, which is like a super strict but super powerful alternative to HTML + CSS. You define the structure however you like, using a schema of your choosing, and then use XSLT to define the output, transformations, and styling. Instead, we get kludges like React trying to shoehorn their own abstractions into a million autogenerated nested <div>s because the DOM is the DOM, and having to build a UI lib on top of that, once per project per company per platform. It sucks!
HTML is a blank piece of paper force-fed into a 90s-style typewriter. Modern UIs are composed out of layers of abstractions that vaguely signal intent. The two are not a good pairing :(