Comment by protonfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by protonfish | Hacker News Reader

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This is the same complaining I always hear from people who don't want to learn how to use HTML and CSS. Yes, it is different than what you are used to. Yes, it will take some time to learn and some of that will be uncomfortable. But that does not mean that that HTML and CSS are bad. I know this because I successfully build mobile sites that look and function fine and I assure you it works.

You say "hackery is required to attempt to imitate native mobile apps" and I agree with you. Can I ask why it is so important to copy the styling of native? That seems like a lot of effort for no good reason. Mobile web can be better than native if you let it, but forcing it to be something else purely for reasons of fashion is foolish.

HTML/CSS produces a flexible layout that is usable by many different sizes and types of devices (even audio interfaces) and that is a good thing. It takes effort to get it working for all of the possible ways it could be used, but it is possible. After a little practice, it can even get easy. The hard parts of HTML/CSS would still exist in any flexible layout solution. Making a rigid screen-painted layout solution avoids problem inherent in flexible layouts those, but it gives up so much.

> After a little practice, it can even get easy.

Just googling for "vertical align text css" should be enough to tell you that different layout is needed. Why shouldn't there be a layout model that makes it easy to do the things people are trying to do?

The idea that we shouldn't even attempt to create a better one is silly.

The question is whether you start over or make incremental improvements. Supporting a new layout doesn't seem like the kind of change that's worth starting over for.

That said, I'm all for experimenting.

We already have one.

http://jsfiddle.net/gJP9k/

Except in IE.

Flexbox is in IE11, and a slightly older version of the spec is in IE10 (with a "ms" prefix).

#vertalign {height: 50%; position: absolute; top: 25%; }

There you go. That CSS is useful for popup dialogs. Though most of the difficulties I see with vertical-alignment are due to poor design and implementation.

HTML and CSS get new features all the time so clearly nobody is saying they shouldn't improve. It's people saying that "HTML is inherently broken so there should be something else but they don't know what" that I am getting sick of.

This requires #vertalign to have fixed height. You cannot have variable height (based on its own content) and also be vertical align.

I know your pain, vertically aligning anything in CSS is quite annoying, unless you have a fixed width outer container. That being said, that's a problem with CSS implementation as it pertains to this one particular problem. The fix isn't to chuck CSS and HTML, but to keep improving it.

I think the problem comes from a lack of understand of the complexity of such a task. Vertical align text according to what? The easiest way to vertical align text is exactly how you'd expect it to be, and it solves the problem perfectly.

If you want to align text vertically, you just do

  font-size: 20px;
  line-height: 40px;
  vertical-align: middle;

What's the problem?

I assume that only work with single line text?

.. and then, when the content is wrapped over two lines you get a line-height that you set just to vertical align the text. Perfect? No :-)

CSS3's flex attribute solves that. It's the holy grail for modern web-interface-development. Vertical center text:

.vertical-text { display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; }

(add ´align-items: center´for horizontal center)

If you're not using HTML/CSS for documents then yes it is bad. It's fundamentally the wrong abstraction. I began my career with HTML and CSS and after seeing alternatives, there is no doubt in my mind that trying to build apps on HTML/CSS is fundamentally wrong.

I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of good ideas introduced by the web (documents, hyperlinks, semantic metadata, responsive layouts, accessibility, URIs, etc.). What I'm saying is that there are good parts and there are bad parts, just like with native. What we need is a marriage of the good parts of the web with the good parts of native.

We can do better. Much much much better.

most of the development frameworks called native, are built on the precursor of html, namely 90s and earlier native app apis, on guis, and they arents perfect abstractions for apps neither. Current native zeitgeist gets its allure mostly from being closer to hardware and is the assembly to C. Otherwise all major mobile GUI APIs are naive attempts by busy developers to imitate, layouts, stylesheets,....

    "precursor of html"

please elaborate.

HTML is based on XML, a language with two primitives, strings and children. Why would you ever use that as an interface if you want something to ever be performant?

What we need is a retain-mode scene graph, where some of the nodes on the scene graph can be HTML documents (with URIs).

Developers don't want a one-to-one relationship between the window object and documents. They instead want a one-to-many relationship. The <article> tag is proof of this.

Take Twitter for example. What is each tweet, but a 140-character document? The application for displaying an infinite list of tweets is not a document, but a multi-document viewer. The Facebook feed is the same thing.

If anything, this would prevent the shenanigans of blocking viewport resizing, because the user could choose an HTML document node on the scene graph and decide to make it full screen (the same way twitter allows you to click on a time stamp to get a permalink)

This retain-mode scene graph would need to support URIs so that you could always link to a subgraph of the scene graph and only view that part.

> HTML is based on XML

No, its not.

HTML is based on SGML (it was originally an SGML application profile, though as of HTML5 it is no longer.)

XML was invented after HMTL, was inspired by HTML, and is also an SGML application profile.

So, insofar as XML and HTML are related all, its closer to the reverse of the relationship you describe.

Thanks for the history lesson.

My point about strings and children still stand though. SGML is a document markup language. It was never designed for complex scene graph work, so I don't get how the OP I responded to came to the conclusion that HTML derived from anything that was originally used for things like applications and GUIs.

What I meant, was initially people were pixel-painting fixed screens and 2D/3D graphic programming evolved as one branch, and GUI app frameworks evolved as another (MacApp anyone?). If you look at earlier Mac/Windows/X app frameworks and iOS/Android app frameworks, you'll see that the latter is a more naive and easy solution to the same problem without the burden of multiple docs, windows and massive multitasking. I'm talking about windows, views, user interface controls, dialogs, textboxes, styling and finally inputs (events). HTML/CSS/JS is a string based natural solution to the same problem.

Finally, current native programming does not get its power from any advanced technique or technology but only due to its privileged position in an underpowered computing device with a smaller screens and newer touch input methods and hardware. This way, mobile GUI API designers didn't have most of the problems of large screen OS framework API designers had. When I look at their APIs, they are too simple, nothing fundamentally new.

So as mobile devices get better in general computing, a post html world may come back, with stringified description of UI elements.

Developers that enjoyed access to Xerox PARC systems, RAD tooling, and environments like NeXTStep already had access to much better hypertext systems with layout support.

Do you have any good links/articles/discussions on these systems? I've read a bit about the origins of NeXTStep, but the work at PARC is something I know little about and RAD tooling is something completely new to me.

Self http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox5P7QyL774

Xerox Star User Interface http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw

Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yxCJfayW-8

The Smalltalk-80 Programming System http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU

The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw

Symbolics Hypertext Document http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DxYj32cvoE

Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7579613

The Mesa/Cedar programming environment https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fbitsavers....

Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oonXT-gYjU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y43fI7Dy04A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QJTsPQQCCc

>but forcing it to be something else purely for reasons of fashion is foolish.

its not fashion, it is UX, usability, and standardization

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