Hacker News Reader

Comment by illiarian | Hacker News Reader

> and evolved to a interactive UI library.

It didn't, not really. We've bolted interactive UI on top, and it's held there by spit, out-of-date duct tape, and wasted lives

> Most added features solve real problems.

They are very ad-hoc post-factum solutions to a subset of real problems that solve those problems very poorly.

You can't escape the fact that the core of the system is made to display a single page of static text. To actually solve and evolve that you need to actually rethink things from scratch. That's why UI is slowly but surely escaping into Canvas and WebGL.

View on HN

> To actually solve and evolve that you need to actually rethink things from scratch. That's why UI is slowly but surely escaping into Canvas and WebGL.

idk how you experience the last 20 years in the web without seeing a proof that we solved and evolved. the dom is in fact so successful and popular for ui that not only is it used for _more_ of what's on the web than it was 20 years ago, but that web ui's only "escape" has been onto the desktop, phones, tvs, embedded, etc

Just because adoption spit off of it’s initial purpose doesn’t mean it’s a good technological plinth, not even in its initial intended scope — nor that it doesn’t.

There are other consideration in technological spread that by far outweigh "being the pinnacle of technological achievement in its field".

Being successful and popular doesn't make it a good technology, or even a technology in any way shape or form suited for what it's used

> the dom is in fact so successful (...)

I'm not sure this means what you think it means.

The DOM was standardized, and became ubiquitous. From thereon, people built upon that not because it was great but because it was all there was. JavaScript is also all there is and was, and everyone agrees that it is everything but great. Even the inception of nodejs and demo is due to the fact that the infrastructure was already there.

Being pervasive is not the same thing as being good or decent.

It’s the best thing we have and it gets the job done.

> It’s the best thing we have

Oh, it's not even close to being the best thing we have.

> Oh, it's not even close to being the best thing we have.

What's the best thing we have then? Because I am not aware of any alternatives to CSS that I can use in the browser.

Of course, when you phrase it as "only available in the browser" then there are no alternatives. That's why Figma had to "create a browser inside the browser" because the tech is just so, so amazing: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com