Comment by Phillips126 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Phillips126 | Hacker News Reader

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I cannot agree with you enough. Our company hired a new manager that had a background "familiarity" with PowerApps. He requested that I (a software developer) create a PowerApp that would be used by the company, essentially a ticketing system. I figured with my ~decade experience in developing complex web applications from the ground up, this would be a piece of cake.

What an abysmal way of developing applications. Everything (containers, widgets, etc.) is basically SVG's and your application looks like your designers couldn't use anything but MS Paint. Creating more complicated interactions with buttons and other UI elements was a pain to develop and making the UI responsive was a nightmare. The generated HTML was insanely ugly and the application was very slow/sluggish feeling. After fighting for a couple weeks, I began to (behind the scenes) build out a quick web application alternative to pitch. Long story short, he LOVED the web app version and that is what we are still using today company wide.

> Everything (containers, widgets, etc.) is basically SVG's

Controversial opinion: vector-based UI widgets are the right way to do web apps. Instead of all the existing framework approaches that ultimately produce HTML, both developers and users would be better served by using HTML for the elements on a screen that correspond to documents, but the web app's "chrome" should use SVG. Most of the complications of frameworks come from a blind spot on the part of developers, who continually select a tool with a high impedance mismatch to their goal (producing an app). This blind spot on the part of developers leaves this area under-explored, and in turn there's under-investment in the specs / on the part of browser makers to eliminate pain points in the way that developers are actually using the platform for their work.

How do you make this accessible?

Can you use ARIA attributes on inline SVG in a Html document? That would do the trick nicely if it works.

The problem is that SVG doesn't AFAIK support layout constraints - you'd have to essentially recreate flexbox and grid in JS, and God forbid you wanted to make the design responsive!

I agree with you in principle that SVG is a better match to app UIs, but we'd need a good layout story for that to happen. And I'm using SVG for much of my own application interface!

You should be able to use CSS (incl. grid, flex, etc) within an SVG context though.

ideally, an SVG layout optimised for web app design would be somewhat more flexible than just grid and flex - such as anchoring an element to 2 other separate parents (or in other words, supporting a directed graph rather than a tree). A pure constraint system would be nice, but is probably not viable if fast rendering is important (which, it is).

Interesting, if SVGs make sense, then a new game-engine-like client makes more sense as a general delivery platform. Maybe Dart/Flutter/Fuchsia isn't far off.

I went down that road for awhile. You start running into problems when you research all of the default behavior that the built-in widgets have, and this is even before you get to accessibility issues.

I love the idea of punting on HTML and writing a ground-up SVG UI toolkit, or even a WebGL based on if you're feeling ambitious, but giving up on the built-in browser behavior and all of the automation tooling around interacting with HTML is a non-starter for most use cases.

The world thought they needed native app stores when they just needed better bookmarking tools for progressive web apps.

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