Hacker News Reader

Comment by protonfish | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion HTML/CSS/JavaScript is the best interface design technology ever invented. I believe it gets a lot of hate because:

1) Amateurs can use it easily and poorly 2) It is not taught in computer science class 3) HTML/CSS is not programming 4) HTML docs attempt to be responsive/liquid as opposed to traditional screen painters.

These are actually good things (and #2 can be fixed) but they represent a significant philosophical shift that most traditional developers don't want to accept.

View on HN

> In my opinion HTML/CSS/JavaScript is the best interface design technology ever invented

i thoroughly agree with this if you say "interface implementation technology" instead of "interface design technology". i also believe anyone who disagrees has never fully explored the various print/console/mobile/mfc/actionscript worlds. i mean... have you ever even USED something like pagemaker?

I am an expert in web technology (approaching 15 years of experience) and I absolutely disagree that that's is the best we have.

Edit: damn, it is more than 15 years already. I've brought home the first HTML spec printout in 1996 and got first money for the website I've built in 1998. Still remember fixing <center> bug in IE3 when it came out…

I used the web in 1993, in the fall, with mosaic, and grey backgrounds. On a 286. With windows 3.1, and 16 colors.

So that makes it 20 years. (dangit!)

Anyway, I think javascript made a mess of it. The point of the web was to link documents. JS makes links obsolete, as they now are relegated to JS-app entry points.

before I get too much in the weeds, I'm gonna go read the article.

Shouldn't calling something "obsolete" mean it's no longer compatible or practical? Links work! They will always work!

The problem is not that JS is worst than links or forms. It's the most potent hypermedia technique (code-on-demand) but it lays behind the Turing horizon: you can't statically determine what it's doing.

What do you feel is the best that we have? I'm not preparing to raise an argument, merely asking for information. My own experience with user interface development outside of the web is pretty limited; I've created a few winform apps and done some OpenGL stuff in college, but that's basically it. Compared to those, I prefer the web stack.

I don't know about rimantas but I really wish CSS would adopt Cassowary like Apple adopted for Cocoa Autolayout. Way better than flexbox.

Cassowary is hands down the best tech for interfaces.

Well, or it gets hate because you have to code for multiple competing implementations that aren't good at interoperability.

> In my opinion HTML/CSS/JavaScript is the best interface design technology ever invented.

Given my experience with the dozens of UI frameworks we enjoyed since the early 80's I cannot agree.

It cannot be called anything else other than a big hack.

you'd think if something were the most successful content platform since the invention of movable type, the scientific approach would be to figure out why, instead of trying to destroy it.

Please breathe, nobody is "destroying" anything.

of course not. you can't despite how much you might want to, and I think a lot of people here do.

One huge benefit of HTML/CSS/JS is this: you are downloading the actual source code. This allows different platforms to interpret it as they will. It also allows developers to learn from each other in an open way. Of course, it allows for security audits as well, since JavaScript can be profiled. Overall, it's the most communicative form of programming.

There is a very large, important difference between "best ever invented (so far)" and "best possible".

If XAML some open source project made by some hippie group of developers, HTML/JAVASCRIPT/CSS would be in the toilet today. It is miles ahead of the barely moving technologies held back by the standards committees.

I'm not sure where you are going with that, but if you think you're going to convince millions of people to rewrite their websites because $NEW_TECH is now on the market, think again.

He is politely giving an example of a superior mark-up language. Just because developers are effectively forced to eat shit we shouldn't pretend it's a piece of a nice cake. Things like angu-bootstrap-whatever are just a thin layer of icing on the top of a big pile of manure.

That's not what parent is saying. Parent is claiming that the only thing preventing us from welcoming our new XAML overlord is that it's made by Microsoft and not an "open source" project made by "some hippie group of developers". That's hogwash.

Is it??? A guaranteed prerequisite to next advancement in web tech is certainly that it does not come out of one of those 'evil corporations'...

It's hogwash because nobody is going to invest billions to remake the Internet with a non-backward compatible technology, wherever said technology comes from.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com