From the perspective of someone deeply rooted in UI development for the desktop, seeing stuff like this makes me glad I am deeply rooted in UI development for the desktop. If I had to build a Cocoa app with this messy, complicated shit ... I'd blow my brains out. All over my desk. Maybe I'd leave a note, but I think people who knew what I did for a living would get it and not need me to leave one.
It also makes me wonder, how we've all decided that HTML is the way to go for this class of application, how hacking a document display format to ape a native UI is a good idea.
I have to think that at some point people think that there has to be a better way to deliver a network transparent, portable UI without worrying about strange things like a Shadow DOM, the hack that is CSS, and all of the other weird shit web developers have to put up with to create something that mimics (usually poorly) a desktop app.
Like is there a breaking point where people are like "fuck it" and come up with an alternative browser that is specific to this and similar kinds of applications? I guess not because the gray line between what HTML is good at and what people need to HTML to do despite itself is a pretty big fat line.
HTML + CSS + Javascript is obviously far from perfect, but is there any other way TODAY to write a single piece of code that will run on just about every computing device in circulation?
Honestly, I challenge anyone to write a simple UI (lets say draw a circle and put some text on the screen) that just works across ALL major operating systems, screen sizes, versions, etc.
If do actually end up doing it in anything besides "web" languages, its going to be more complicated and take longer as well....
To make a car analogy, The Chevy small block V8 engine was/is never the best, fastest, most efficient engine. It's just that for the past 40+ years they've put the damn thing in every vehicle imaginable. It's pretty ubiquitous in the auto world....It just works and everyone still uses it. Sort of like how you will find a HTML, CSS, Javscript rendering engine in everything today...
Things are not that complicated today,really.It's just that there isnt only one way to do things.
> I have to think that at some point people think that there has to be a better way to deliver a network transparent, portable UI without worrying about strange things like a Shadow DOM, the hack that is CSS, and all of the other weird shit web developers have to put up with to create something that mimics (usually poorly) a desktop app
It already exists : GWT,or you can use something like C++ and the emscripten toolchain,and whatever C++ gui framework. So if you dislike all the js/html/css you can definetly avoid it.And users dont care,provided it runs in their browser without plugin.
Most webdevs wont use these because they already know javascript and there are good frameworks out there.
And at the end of the day it is still a webpage,it's not a desktop app.
I've just started getting into Cocoa dev after doing iOS for a while and it has more than its own share of warts. KVO is a clunky API that's very inconsistently available and easy to misuse. Interfaces built using auto layout in xibs are very tricky to debug and maintain. There's all kinds of string typing in the APIs which defeats many of the benefits of static typing. And there seem to be a lot of quirks and bugs in the API overall which I'm guessing are a result of Apple shifting its focus to iOS, where the money is.
All in all I'll take the web stack, particularly with the changes coming down the pipe. Javascript with ES6 is a much better language. And if web components really take off then component-based UI development on the web will be pretty competitive with Cocoa.
This is one of those religious debates that will never die as long as the web exists in a similar capacity as it does, today.
The fact of the matter—whether we like it or not—is that these are the tools we have for web development. It's hacks on hacks on hacks, as one might expect in a suite of technologies originally intended for X but arguably powerful enough to perform Y, Z, and Z(2014). Take ECMAScript: the first draft was written up retroactively, quirks and all. Many of the oddities and edgecases were written into the official language spec and vendors were encouraged to implement them as written (thus, intentionally writing engines with quirks).
But the fact remains that no single, "fuck it" has been able to take hold. The technologies we have at our disposal have proven themselves "good enough" to keep that from happening to date. At this point, we've invested ~20 years into these technologies.
And, for what it's worth, there are ways to cut through the cruft. These things can be done moderately cleanly. It is possible to write a web-based application that doesn't make one want to blow their brains out (I'd make the argument that, in a lot of cases if you're trying to write a "desktop app" in the browser, you're focusing on the wrong thing but that's neither here nor there[0]). It's simply that legacy and twisting the language to do what we want and not what it was intended for has caused that to not be terribly straightforward.
I understand you're being hyperbolic but it's been my experience that this mindset ("this is so bad I'm never going to touch it") generally comes from folks who take one look and turn in disgust. That's fine—and I'm not going to argue it's not without it's warts because that would be insanity—but it isn't so bad that you'd need to off yourself, and I think the staying power it has had regardless of quirks, poor design choices, etc., proves that.
[0] - with the right team and the right reasons, it can be done. The Slack desktop app is a pretty good example of when it makes sense and is done quite well.
Sun with Java and Java applets wanted to be that. Maybe Flash and Flew dreamed of that too.
Browsers were said to render the OS irrelevant and in a way Chromebooks come close to that.
We were also supposed to not owned & store any software locally and rent & download everything. Office Online, Creative clood are there.
But things are rarely that radical and the web was there and opened. I prefer desktop apps (and I'm a web developer !) but how can you beat the ability to login to any of your web tool from any computer ?
It also makes me wonder, how we've all decided that HTML is the way to go for this class of application, how hacking a document display format to ape a native UI is a good idea.
I have to think that at some point people think that there has to be a better way to deliver a network transparent, portable UI without worrying about strange things like a Shadow DOM, the hack that is CSS, and all of the other weird shit web developers have to put up with to create something that mimics (usually poorly) a desktop app.
Like is there a breaking point where people are like "fuck it" and come up with an alternative browser that is specific to this and similar kinds of applications? I guess not because the gray line between what HTML is good at and what people need to HTML to do despite itself is a pretty big fat line.