Comment by joev_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joev_ | Hacker News Reader

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> If I want to style my button, I set some properties on the button.

You cannot be serious. A 1000+ line long setup() method that creates a ton of one-off elements, sets a million properties, and saves them all as instance variables is in no way superior to using some XML to structure your elements, and then a separate, extracted layer for styling. I've done the procedural shit before, in Java, UIKit, Cocoa, you name it. There's just no way you can actually think that is better. Presentational separation is a good thing. (btw you can write your UI in the same procedural way in Javascript if you think it is superior/are a masochist).

The rest of your comment is very rambling and does not really have a point so I will hold off on replying to it. I write polished, pixel-perfect, cross-platform interfaces, and HTML/CSS is the best tool I have found for the job. Nobody will ever say it is perfect of course, but IMHO it beats the hell out of WinForms! You are right, it is a lot to learn for a 1st year developer, but you are going to get a shitty UI out of a 1st year developer, who cares?

> You cannot be serious. A 1000+ line long setup() method that creates a ton of one-off elements, sets a million properties, and saves them all as instance variables is in no way superior to using some XML to structure your elements, and then a separate, extracted layer for styling. I've done the procedural shit before, in Java, UIKit, Cocoa, you name it. There's just no way you can actually think that is better. Presentational separation is a good thing. (btw you can write your UI in the same procedural way in Javascript if you think it is superior/are a masochist).

Depends what I am doing.

Shipping a large scale commercial app with thousands of UI elements? I sure as heck pull everything out.

But if I am making an app that has a dozen UI elements and maybe a couple of screens in total? It isn't worth my time to switch tabs between my code and an XML file.

> I write polished, pixel-perfect, cross-platform interfaces, and HTML/CSS is the best tool I have found for the job.

Pixel perfect is trivial in any system. Winforms can do pixel perfect, and has a damn hard time doing anything else!

A UI that scales across screen sizes? A UI that auto adjusts itself as needed? You can do it in CSS (many websites do!) but isn't fun.

And I do wonder how you found CSS, a layout language which until recently couldn't even do simple math, to be the best tool for creating UIs.

There have been decent CSS pre-processors out for awhile, sure, those work. If you do parts of your layout using JavaScript at run time, hey, that can also work.

But pure CSS before CSS3? Bleck.

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