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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

> I prefer to think that responsive design is still in its relative infancy and as an industry we simply have not completed the shift in mindset that is necessary.

Absolutely. We finally just got container queries! Responsive design using screen width was always a sham. A stop gap to all the work the browser devs and standards bodies had to do to figure out what worked.

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You are correct, but I think we're lacking in things even more basic than that.

Pretty much every single responsive design I ever worked had either the mobile or desktop version as an afterthought. The mobile was just a "scaled down" version that was done last-minute, or vice versa.

Is there a sidebar? Hamburger menu it is. Is there a list? Well just put every row on top of each other.

Sure, this makes things easier for the both the designer and the developers, but putting just a bit more effort in the "secondary" version would be enough to make both versions better.

> A stop gap to all the work the browser devs and standards bodies had to do to figure out what worked.

We now exactly what works. UI didn't suddenly appear in 2024 out of nowhere.

What you need are actual tools to build UIs, and not a hodge-podge of hacks thrown in together with no long-term planning, and aimed at displaying only text and a couple of images.

Just giving the ability to get an element's size without causing a full-page re-flow and re-layout would give much more power to UIs than any number of relative sizes and container queries.

There's only a few apps that qualifies to be app, and for those, flexbox is usually enough. But most apps are actually document viewers and a few buttons to select, filter and sort data (you don't doom-scroll on Photoshop). And if you want to design a document (or a form for that matter), you either go with the reflowable mindset, or you do preset sizes and constraints.

I've yet to see a web app approach anything close to Norton Commander with "flexbox is enough", much less anything more complex.

Well, there are a few standalone examples here or there, but "flexbox is enough" is verifiably false.

Here's an actual app and not the anemic crap that people call "apps" on the web: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1424052288205856773

Even with native toolkit, an app like this one will require custom widgets and layout engines. The equivalent is Canvas, but I don’t know how performant it is.

> Even with native toolkit, an app like this one will require custom widgets and layout engines.

Yes, yes it would. That is why I wrote this: "Just giving the ability to get an element's size without causing a full-page re-flow and re-layout would give much more power to UIs than any number of relative sizes and container queries."

Because on the web you can barely make custom widgets and it's almost impossible to do custom layouts.

Unless, of course, you use the equivalent of early 2000s Windows GDI in the form of Canvas, or a limited subset of OpenGL in the form of WebGL etc. And yes, people end up resorting to that. Look at what Figma wrote: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to... "Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser"

Come on, the rest of us do not consent to your attempt to move the goalposts here and redefine "good UI toolkit" as "I can build Cubase in it." Your comment is not really constructive.

I'm not moving goalposts. I'm refusing to accept the verifiably false statements about web's suitability for app UIs.

To repeat my statement: UI didn't suddenly appear in 2024 out of nowhere. We know what an app UI looks like. And the anemic "flexbox is good for most apps" is verifiable bullshit. This is the constructive criticism.

Edit. Also the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40440939

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