Hacker News Reader

Comment by thyristan | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if it's Google's fault alone. My impression is, all browsers are holding back on everything HTML-native and JavaScript-free. There have been literal decades of no progress, and only tiny steps forward as of late.

We've had things like https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtwidgets-module.html since the late last millenium. Back in the day, there was Delphi, now there is Lazarus, with even nicer Data-Bound widgets. Look at some tutorial for those, that's like magic, and also from before 2000!

Does anyone know why there have been 3 lost decades in native HTML widgets? Any ideas how to fix this?

View on HN

> My impression is, all browsers are holding back on everything HTML-native and JavaScript-free.

Somewhat tangentially, the official response to a request for WebAuthn without JavaScript[1] was that the big websites don’t care and thus neither do the browsers.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/webauthn/issues/1255

Surveillance capitalism LOVES javascript.

I guess the main issue is that HTML was supposed to be a language to describe documents. We abuse it to design interactive applications. I would rather like to not have one technology to support to different use cases. It’s a shame we are riding that abomination for developing apps.

An HTML document is also an interactive application - that's what hyperlinks and forms are. The script tag has been a part of HTML since the late 90s, the original intent was that it supported multiple scripting languages. The distinction between "app" and "document" is a modern ideological quirk, few sites are strictly one or the other.

My guess is that it takes time to research what universal behavior users expect from a component based on examples in existing software. It's universal, so it has to work with everyone: mouse, keyboard, touch; large monitors and tiny phones; screen readers; and users with motor difficulties. And existing components may not have even thought of all of these cases.

For example, they've recently introduced the Interest Invoker API for tooltips on hover. Tooltips are ubiquitous, but they still haven't settled on what the trigger is for non-mouse users. Long press for touch is far less discoverable than mouse hover, for example.

Maybe it's a good thing they didn't rush this design three decades ago, when virtually all users were on desktop.

There will always be the next big thing.

Maybe VR glasses will be big soon. Do we trigger on 'blink'? 'look harder'? 'eyeball wiggle'?

Maybe voice interfaces? Trigger on 'say it louder'? 'stuttering'? 'hesitant'?

Maybe guestures, facial expressions, thought patterns? 'think hard about that button to trigger tooltip'? 'furl your eyebrows'?

As I've said, decades have passed with no progress. If progress in other fields is a reason for waiting, it'll be stagnant forever and eventually just dead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com