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Comment by prohobo | Hacker News Reader

In a sense, yes. HTML and CSS (with JS?) are the best UI creation combo anyone could ever design, because so much effort has gone into making websites look nice over the decades. Millions of people and thousands of companies trying to create websites has pushed the standards really far ahead of any other UI kit.

I think eventually they'll become integrated with operating systems natively, rather than requiring webview. But that means desktop managers will become much more integrated with the web as well.

Basically I see a future where your OS is your internet browser as well as window manager, process manager, etc.

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No. No! NO!

HTML and CSS are not the answer. If anything, you should be scared off by the fact that webpages require at least three languages to implement anything useful (HTML, CSS, and JS), and that doesn't count whatever you could use for a backend (PHP? I'm not a web developer, so I don't know what the cool kids use, other than maybe Node.js.)

In my book, the fewer langauges you use, the better: I will even extend this to Qt and QML (and it should be pointed out that I am passionate about using Qt and QML!). Multiple languages necessitate (often fragile) bridges to work together; plus, they take much more time and effort to learn. If you could learn one language and use it to make an app, wouldn't you jump at that instead of learning 3 or 4 languages before you could make an app?

Others have already added some great comments about the wisdom (or rather the lack thereof) of integrating a web browser into the OS. Myself? I don't wish anybody a future of bloated webapps for everything.

> you should be scared off... the fewer langauges you use, the better

As an engineer, I see this differently. A "language" is not simply (or always) syntax. Generally speaking, any API is already a language, and it's normal to use several APIs in one application; I'd even say, the more the merrier. Further, it is OK for an API to be represented as a DSL (domain-specific language) with a syntax of its own, so it's all good.

Fear of bloated webapps taking over the world is maybe paranoia, but well placed paranoia at that. It's not the fault of the tools though, it's the developers who have a terrible mindset. You can argue that the "system" encourages this, but I think it could just be growing pains and incompetence. We're in the teenager phase of the web, in my opinion.

I also have an argument against the "too many languages" point: What's happening in the modern web is that HTML, CSS, and JS are slowly combining. A lot of projects are moving towards TSX components (Typescript and React, Vue, Svelte, etc.) with Tailwind CSS. So: Typing, layout, scripting, and styling all in one cohesive package that can easily be abstracted into components or classes.

I think eventually there will be a singularity of sorts where we have a standard toolkit/language.

From my own experience building websites and native apps, I can move around in web tech like a god damn ninja but I hate electron. I hate the inefficiency of using a browser for the UI. Qt and Gtk feel clunky and limited compared to web, but are native. But now there's Tauri, and I think it's a large step in the right direction.

HTML and CSS are maybe the best UI creation combo if you only ever care about visual aesthetic design.

Any other aspects of what UI design is supposed to be about, ergonomics, usability, consistency, accessibility, internationalization is total crap in HTML/CSS. What is the taborder of your custom HTML/CSS datepicker? What will happen when I press <Esc> on your custom css popup? What is the keyboard shortcut to highlight that form field or to open that hamburger menu? How will my screenreader pronounce that hamburger symbol? Will it be the same for the next great HTML/CSS creation? Will the date format follow my locale?

HTML/CSS is great only if you are the strictly visual aesthetics kind of "designer" who only care about reproducing their napkin drawings and photoshop mockups. For all the other things one would ask of a proper UI, HTML/CSS is either useless or actively detrimental.

You could just use a component library with standards.

Your argument is essentially that freedom means bad outcomes, but it actually means more possible outcomes.

No. My argument is that HTML/CSS is unsuitable for the things I've named, some are impossible, most are hard and therefore rarely done.

Stockholm Syndrome is real.

There were far, far better UI kits in the 90s, which is why programs were a lot more usable back then. NeXT comes to mind. It doesn't help that Linux has wasted the past decade struggling to solve the difficult problem of (checks notes) who is logged in to a graphical seession.

> Basically I see a future where your OS is your internet browser as well as window manager, process manager, etc.

I sure hope you're wrong. It's definitely happening in some respect and to me it feels like we are undoing the shift from corporate controlled, centralized computing to personal computing where users are in control that happened from the late 70's through most of the 90's.

I've posted this quote here before, but I still think about it all the time. In Ellen Ullman's excellent book Life in Code she quotes Whitfield Diffie:

> We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

Which gave another huge boost in audience. Many sites and services of whatever one could imagine, cross platform and often free to use.

Good for population in general, who won't tinker anyways.

Bit of spectrum example, not just black and white.

Windows Active Desktop and ChromeOS have shown how "great" it happens to be.

Even WebOS has support for Qt based applications, and ChromeOS had to add support for Android and GNU/Linux containers to run alongside the Chrome stack.

> In a sense, yes. HTML and CSS (with JS?) are the best UI creation combo anyone could ever design,

Maybe for a very specific sort of aesthetic optimization, but for everything else it is my opinion that modern web stack remains inferior to Visual Basic and HyperCard, both of which were easier to use for creating interfaces, and in my opinion both of which looked better.

> In a sense, yes. HTML and CSS (with JS?) are the best UI creation combo anyone could ever design, because so much effort has gone into making websites look nice over the decades

Even with all that effort it has just recently surpassed the era of WinForms. How much effort is it to customize a date picker in web tech? Layouting was completely broken for decades, only now is it semi-okay. WebComponents are also a recentish development, but they are absolutely essential.

Also, how come WYSIWYG editors are not common?! They were everywhere.

> the best UI creation combo anyone could ever design

Hahahahahahabonk.

Like what FirefoxOS was doing.

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