Hacker News Reader

Comment by selfmodruntime | Hacker News Reader

Why? They are the best layouting tools we have to this day. Or do you want to go back to

  TextElement textElement = new TextElement(); 
  textElement.position(100, 100);
  textElement.color(Colors.RED);
  textElement.alignment(Alignment.CENTER);
  ...

and the likes? These kind of descriptional ui tools are horrible in my opinion.

View on HN

I find those tools much easier to get a decent GUI layout with. Getting the same layouts with HTML and CSS seems to involve a pile of hacks, because they were designed as document markup, not button and panel layout tools. (that said, a markup system for constraint based layout would probably be better, and CSS does seem to be growing some of the features, it still just seems to be hard to get something that works as consistently as e.g. Qt).

...and yet we still have these things, like Gtk, Tk, ImGUI, some parts of Qt, etc, and they work reasonably well. I just spent time building a new widget set for small LCD screens (~160x40) and built the set in as simple a way as I could, and this was the easiest method to do so. Sure, it's not great from a designer perspective, but it gets the job done -- more or less what HTML + CSS do now, but (frankly) in a far less verbose way.

We had layout managers by the early 90s, and Java was not the only choice. Delphi, wxPython, and Qt were/are pretty good. Do not use pixel positioning or hardcode colors was right in the docs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com