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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

> I really hate how modern developers try to reinvent forms. They always, always get it worse than the basic OS/HTML forms we've had for decades. Those dead stupid, simple forms were highly accessible, very performant, and easy to understand.

Because the web is a terrible platform that made basic reusable components far harder than they ever needed to be, so every developer got into bad habits of rolling their own solutions to every problem. It's gotten better now but modernizing involves throwing out literal decades of practice.

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What do you mean? There's plenty of simple standard HTML to achieve nearly everything needed (except fancy nonsense and tracking). As GP says, simple, highly accessible, very performant, easy to understand (both for the developer and the user).

You couldn't even use input type="date" until a couple of years ago because of Safari support. There was more than enough time of the web missing absolutely basic crap like this that you had to assume that most things weren't available batteries-included, and because of poor modularization related to css and the massive amount of Javascript needed to get anything done, too often the solution was "use a giant-ass framework".

For developers supporting projects implemented using simple raw-js or things like jquery, it's no wonder they developed a habit of DIY. I've had review so much code and push back on this stuff, so I fully understand why it happens.

> You couldn't even use input type="date" until a couple of years ago because of Safari support.

God, that was such a pain. I recently ripped 20k(!) SLOC out of a project that was finally allowed to drop support for those old Safari versions. All just to display one single datetime picker.

The entire rest of the project is less than 2k SLOC.

I think the only thing I have found really missing from HTML forms (for me) is the combo box, which is a combination dropdown and input field.

Wait, that's just a dropdown with an input field placed next to it that becomes visible when you pick "other" in the dropdown menu.

I hate when people try to do the dropdown and the "write your own" in one field. It's very confusing how to use those.

> the web is a terrible platform that made basic reusable components far harder than they ever needed to be

I think it made them just hard enough to ensure continuous employment of lots of web developers :)

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