Hacker News Reader

Comment by cline6 | Hacker News Reader

The failure of every new solution seems to always come back to the fact that html, css, and js are just too poorly suited for building the complex UIs people want today. And the sad reality is that there isn't an engineer out there building these things that has any agency to come up with an alternative.

It would take Google, Apple, and Microsoft coming together to define a new system of building as an alternative. Think things like, new client, new protocol, new language, perhaps not having to write anything resembling markup at all (the joy!),

Obviously the chances of this happening are nil. So we shuffle along adding yet another layer of transformation on top of these broken technologies, hoping it will be enough.

View on HN

You're right.

It was solved with Silverlight - declarative UIs in XAML. No CSS. Strongly typed C#. The downside was you needed to install the plugin.

So there are better ways than HTML/CSS/JS but we're stuck with them, because they are browser-native. WASM might rescue us!

I've at least managed to almost completely get rid of JS/SPA framework madness in the browser by going back to server rendered pages (adding reactivity where needed with datastar signals). Datastar is a breath of fresh air and might just make all SPA frameworks obsolete (just as they in turn killed jQuery).

My personal take is largely to blame the css/html divide as the biggest hurdle here. Maybe it is the three fold css/html/js divide, more broadly?

It isn't that any one of them is bad. But, having three seems to want to relate to a Conway's Law where you have three different "teams" somewhat collaborating with each other. In reality, far more is done by a single team than otherwise. Even when you have a graphics design team, often they build their first artifacts in other systems and then it is down to that single team to try and bridge them together.

There is also the absurd level of flexibility that was baked into CSS. Somewhat ironic that we are digging our way out of the limitations of CSS by adding more and more flexibility to it.

Yes, the original set of web technologies was simply not designed with the kinds of interactive UIs people expect today.

Perhaps in the future UIs can be rendered with WASM, with the common rendering libraries being distributed as a separate WASM module (so users would not have to repeatedly download large files)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com