Despite all the mess, I have an easier time getting buttons on a screen and doing things sanely (once all the fuss is set up) compared to trying to get the ball rolling in Qt/GTK/etc (especially if you're not using Java or C++)
HTML is simply a terrible GUI base, JS is quite great nowadays and CSS would be great, but has to provide way too much of what HTML should be doing. But the web ui frameworks are just barely getting at the level of where native frameworks have been in a decade.
And there are plenty of other “layouting primitives”, all of which are quite cumbersome. And due to HTML encoding some form of semantic meaning only (though seldom used even for that), drag n drop tools can’t generate easy to read/modify output. Also, without js frameworks, you can’t really just embed another component into it trivially.
And I’m not trying to shit on web tech, JS has absolutely overcome its shitty past, and is quite a likable language nowadays, and CSS is an extremely powerful and expressive system (though this latter is due in part to how shitty html is). My only gripe is with HTML that is simply not fit for the task (as it was never meant for that).
If by structure you mean things like hbox/vbox then no, html is not supposed to do that. HTML should only represent the semantic structure.
Swing, Qt, et al do not have great answers to this problem, and definitely not superior ones than css.
but I agree in general with your statement.
There are a couple of exceptions for interfaces that are genuinely unconventional, or that deal with multiple spacial dimensions, or that are primarily representing graphs and visual/audio data. But most interfaces should be representable in pure text.
This argument that "the web is only for documents" is missing the point that most applications are just interactive documents when you really break down their UI. A labeled tree is a fine way to represent user-facing state for most apps, and most apps would benefit from exposing a more semantic interface to users that was easier for them to manipulate and read programmatically.
If I had to pick a stack to do a new web app entirely in canvas, I'd probably choose to port a ton of interface components from AS3 into PixiJS... but the point is, where have we gotten? Ten years from now we'll be writing apps the way they were written in 2010 -- inside a black box in a canvas or VM. The HTML5/JS revolution has been a sham from the start, just a way for one corporation to dismantle another with the side benefit of forcing all of us to rewrite our code from scratch in a crappier language.
Anyway, that's not very important.
What web apps never had is a visual app builder as popular as the first Visual Basic for Windows 3. We had some tools like that (example Jwt [2]) but none of them got a critical mass of users. Maybe it's difficult to match Visual Basic's success because Microsoft controlled the tool, the operating system and the language. If this is the case the only current candidate is Google, because of Chrome. They are investing on Flutter and Dart now but making them prosper on the web looks like a uphill battle. Much easier on Android.
Like I wouldn't want to have to deal with an interfrace like facebook in native stuff. I don't think it's impossible, but I feel like it would require a lot more up-front design and correct engineering.
You're right about XML being a medium, just kinda my memories of working with this stuff.
Yeah, its true — though you can leave an area empty where you will dynamically load one from a set of already drag’n’drop created layouts.
CSS:
.vbox, .hbox { display: flex }
.vbox { flex-direction: column }
.vbox > *, .hbox > * { flex-grow: 1 }
<div class="hbox">
<div class="vbox">
<button>Top left</button>
<button>Bottom left</button>
</div>
<div class="vbox">
<button>Top right</button>
<button>Bottom right</button>
</div>
</div>
ah, yes, the famous difficulty of getting buttons on a screen in Qt https://streamable.com/bs5fxk
By the way - Qt and GTK are super-outdated ways to do GUI in C++. Popular, but outdated.
As an aside, do "modern" developers still write GUI applications at all, since everything is on the web anyway these days?
I even write terminal user interfaces sometimes to interact with servers that don't have a desktop environment installed.
The films you watch on TV or at the cinema were not created (edited, VFX) using a web browser for a start, and the User Interfaces to those applications are pretty Graphical by anyone's definition...
to add on this, the reference UI toolkit for building VFX tools is Qt. Maya, DaVinci, Lightworks, Nuke... are all Qt-based.
Not disagreeing with what you said, but "not having anything to do with the web" isn't as clear cut as it used to be and web technologies are increasingly showing up in unexpected places.
You want to be utilizing the features C++11, C++14 and maybe even newer versions of the standard allow you to use, to avoid unnecessary boilerplate, repetition, and arcane-ness of syntax and semantics.
Similarly, the GUI toolkit should not be based on C-like or C++98-like design patterns, when newer versions of the standard allow replacing them with more convenient patterns.
Here's one example, from the Nana C++ GUI toolkit:
#include <nana/gui.hpp>
#include <nana/gui/widgets/label.hpp>
#include <nana/gui/widgets/button.hpp>
int main() {
nana::form form;
nana::label label{form, "Hello, <bold blue size=16>Nana C++ Library</>"};
label.format(true);
nana::button button{form, "Quit"};
button.events().click( [&form]{ form.close(); } );
form.div("vert <><<><weight=80% text><>><><weight=24<><button><>><>");
form["text"] << label;
form["button"] << button;
form.collocate();
form.show();
//Start to event loop process, it blocks until the form is closed.
nana::exec();
}
#include <QtWidgets>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
QApplication app{argc, argv};
QWidget widg;
QVBoxLayout form{&widg};
QLabel label{
R"(Hello, <span style="font-weight: 600; font-size: 16pt; color: blue;">Qt C++ Library</span>)"};
QPushButton button{"Quit"};
button.connect(&button, &QPushButton::clicked, [&widg] { widg.close(); });
form.addStretch(0.1);
form.addWidget(&label);
form.addStretch(0.7);
form.addWidget(&button);
form.addStretch(0.2);
widg.show();
app.exec();
}
g++ example.cpp -I/usr/include/qt/ -I/usr/include/qt/QtWidgets -fPIC -lQt5Widgets -lQt5Core
tl;ds: now that I saw it in action, I know I can instantly ignore anyone who says that nana is a suitable replacement for Qt.
... could you precise that more ? I'm literally just making "new project" > design view > search for the button component > drag'n'drop it ? How can it get more simple ?
(opening a text file and writing "Button {}" is definitely more complicated if we're talking about teaching to beginners)
if teaching beginners to programming sure, if teaching a programmer beginning QT development no.
as someone who teaches programming in university, that's definitely not true, less than 1 in 20 students has the reflex of looking for any kind of documentation (even after showing it to them)
But then the Qt UI:
* needs to be (re)compiled for each platform
* needs to be re-shipped on each change
* is not a client-server application (all runs on the client)
* has "desktop styling" by default
I think of it like democracy. It is ugly and terrible, but still better than all the other options.