Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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Mostly what has replaced X11 and Wayland is HTML, where you create GUIs in a completely language-agnostic way by writing angle-bracket-delimited <tags> to stdout, with no need to deal with C libraries. The main difference is that the escape codes are introduced by '<', ASCII 60, instead of ESC, ASCII 27.

For some good reasons and some bad ones, the HTML escape-code language was coupled to a shift from the time-sharing interactive terminal applications of MGR or the VT100 to a revival of the 3270 block-mode interaction model, which later got formalized as REST.

Paul Graham wrote some essays about the advantages of doing things this way late last millennium; they're worth reading if you haven't read them. It really took off about 20 years ago.

More recently spitting out HTML on stdout has largely been replaced by JS and the DOM because you can get lower interaction latency and higher bandwidth by running the app on the client, sending mostly just database calls and actions to a backend server.

Tk had this language agnostic way of placing widgets and interface elements and the library took care of the layout. It was somewhat successful, but not as much as HTML, which is slow and clunky in comparison.

Some aspects of HTML are slower than Tk (which is not all that language-agnostic — you can't write Tk apps in bash or Gambas or Prolog, which are totally capable of outputting HTML), but some aspects of Tk are slower than HTML. I feel like HTML with JS is generally a smoother and more agile development experience than Tk.

I know you are trying to be funny. But it's a rather sad story after all.

Why would you think I'm trying to be funny? Everything I wrote is literally true, though maybe it's a perspective you're unfamiliar with. I don't think it's sad either.

Did you mean RESET instead of REST as in the API ?

I meant REST, and I don't know what you might mean by "RESET". REST isn't an API; it's the architectural style describing how the WWW works. Check out Roy Fielding's dissertation, "Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures": https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm

Thanks yes that's what I was talking about I come across it mostly as an API framework but was not aware it (the architecture;) had any link back to anything 3270 thanks for giving me something to explore.

REST is not an "API framework" as usually understood, because "API" generally means "interface based on procedure calls," while REST prohibits interfaces based on procedure calls.

Well I see a lot of systems which rely on RESTfull APIs [1] for some level of external interoperability but maybe framework is the wrong phrasing.

[1] https://restfulapi.net/

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