Now try to make a layout with that form example that you could free form put anywhere in 2d space and have it flex properly as the window size changes beyond the defaults that html gives you and make the generic B2B SAAS dashboard like Segment, RevenueCat, Mixpanel, Datadog, Sentry, etc. I bet you could make a VB6 / Pascal equivalent much faster than you would be able to with a mobile or web app, especially if they were updated with a decent graph widget set.

Also your two examples are drawing canvas examples, thats a pretty different target that delphi / vb6 have with their GUI toolkits.

i'm struggling under the misconception that having things flex properly as the window sizes is the default in html and basically impossible in vb6. but i'm very open to having my misconceptions corrected. is there a public video that demonstrates what it looks like when an expert uses vb6, so i can see what things that are hard in html are easy in vb6?

i have no idea what segment, revenuecat, mixpanel, datadog, sentry, etc., are

The point everyone is making is that you could have modernized the VB6/Lazarus approach to meet modern needs and it would have been much more productive than what we have currently with html+css.

And indeed, many of the complaints people have about VB6 not supporting multiple resolutions, etc, are fixed in Lazarus.

it's possible that the people i was talking to meant that, but i took them to mean something much stronger, that there are things that were easy and fluent in vb6 that are clumsy in dhtml. and i'd like to know what those things were, but text is not a good medium for that

christine lavin wrote a song about your interpretation https://mojim.com/usy144575x1x8.htm in which she says

    The reality of me
    cannot compete
    with the dreams you have of her.
    And the love you've given me
    is not as sweet
    as the feelings that she stirs.
    And so you turn away
    and you say that you're sorry,
    But you must pursue this dream,
    this improbable dream.
    Though things have not been bad,
    you can't say you've had
    Quite as good a time as it first seemed.

some software that could have been written is always better than all software that has actually been written

The conversation often goes like this.

creating UI's in VB6 was so much faster and easier than html+css

yeah, but they're not reactive to resolution changes.

me: but they could have been updated rather than throwing them away and going with the complexity of today's solution.

the person i was talking to seemed to be saying the opposite: that vb6 uis adapted better to window size changes than html. i'd like to understand what they meant

css has gotten pretty complex, but html isn't inherently complex

FYI, since 2017-ish doing layouts in HTML is much easier if you use "display: grid". Just be aware that the numbering is based on lines, not boxes. Also be aware that to use percentage-based heights at top level, you have to style the `html` and `body` too.

Additionally, use of `@container` queries (the modern, poorly-documented alternative to `@media` queries) lets you do more advanced layout changes on element resize. This requires adding `container-type: size` style on the parent (I found this very confusing in the docs).

> Just be aware that the numbering is based on lines, not boxes.

With grid-template-areas, you can use ascii art instead of specifying rows/columns manually. Though you would still need numbers if you wanted something other than the default spacing, which would be based on the content.

I'm going back to FRAMESETs :V

Responsive UI like its 1996!