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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

You don't need the Web for that. Windows puts the positive button on the left, macOS has it on the right, and Windows CE (for embedded stuff and palmtops with small screens) had OK buttons in the title bar.

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These are three different languages which are (ought to be) internally consistent though. Humans are pretty good at switching contexts when there's a clear difference between these, like using their PC, their Mac or holding their phone. What they suck at is learning something that isn't consistent at all.

But at the least the decision is the same across the OS. If you spend several hours using the system you will know the "right" way. But in the web you're on nowhere's land.

When you put it that way, it kind of undermines the snark towards web developers. Of course things are inconsistent, no one is in charge to say “this is the way the platform does it.”

There are lots of other design sins this doesn’t excuse (low contrast, for instance), but expecting conventions to be as consistent as on a desktop OS feels naive.

Doesn't a plain old <input> do it the way the platform does it?

I'm a little confused by your question. The discussion is about which button should be ok, and which should be cancel. The browser will not lay that out for you, you have to pick a layout.

There are some things where the browser will apply platform conventions, but nothing resembling the consistency you'd expect from (well-designed) native apps.

OK, I interpreted this thread more generally about controls, like the checkboxes and radio buttons of the OP.

The HTML input element without any styling applied is usually rendered by the browser using the UI conventions of the operating system. But nobody uses bare input elements these days.

<input> has never affected the button order. It also has no concept of primary / secondary button and for the better or the worst, has by default the styling the browser wants it to have, which might look like the native buttons of the current OS, or the native styling of one of toolkits anyway. System colors are not supported consistently too (although I'm discovering CSS4 a has interesting features [1], neat, but Chrome is lagging behind)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/system-colo...

Is it? What if you run a foreign app, a half-assed port, or an Electron thing whose developers didn’t check for the OS?

Nothing stops Web developers from flipping the buttons if they detect a Mac, but that would make things more confusing if someone is using the same Web app on multiple platforms, or if the docs have screenshots from different platforms (to each other or to the user).

At least in windows you can pretty consistently hit ENTER in a dialog box to close it with the default action, though. That's something that has always annoyed me on Mac.

Didn't windows also switch button positions regularly for all their nagware around upgrading to windows 10?

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