On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 11:34:15 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
On Friday, 6 March 2015 at 10:55:34 UTC, ketmar wrote:
wow, what a shitload of crap! exactly what i mean when i wrote "most
people doing it wrong".

Describe what is right?

To most developers, doing it right means saving developer time and if possible push "design declarative programming" onto designers.

Which is basically what shadow-dom allows you to do. There are some quirks with styling still, but there is overall progress.

I've been working with various GUIs (Swing, Cocoa, JavaFX, SWT, GTKD, TKinter etc.) and I am working with HTML/CSS/JS (have to!). Frankly speaking, I hate JS and wish there was a way to get rid of it (please, don't try to convince me that JS is somehow good - it isn't - and that there is jquery and blah dee blah. Please don't.). What I can tell from my own personal experience is that in _theory_ something like HTML5 would be very nice, due to the fact that it is supported, maintained and improved on all platforms (manpower & brainpower), so that you come pretty close to the "write once, run everywhere" ideal. Given the plethora of platforms nowadays, especially in the mobile sector, it is impossible to develop a GUI application for each platform. What you want is something based on browser technology that is understood everywhere, without having to worry about any platform specific quirks or pitfalls. Something that is only a thin layer that is agnostic to the logic, the data processing that goes on in the app. Unfortunately, the only way to do this today is HTML5+JS (it's the JS bit that annoys me).

In the old days (before smartphones), people would develop applications for Windows, OS X, and maybe Linux (if it was in the budget). But today this is simply impossible. So yes, from a developer's point of view, you want something like HTML5/CSS/JS, only better, regardless of what's the GUI ideal. Using technologies (other than HTML5) that interface to native widgets, is not maintainable, you're always one step behind.

To cut a long story short, ideals and pragmatism are at loggerheads here, but at the end of the day, you have to get your apps out there for as many people and as many platforms as possible, with the least effort possible. So HTML5 and related technologies win in this respect. And users don't care what's under the hood. They simply ask "Can I download an app?". If they can't, they are very annoyed. D should find a way to interact with the "app world".

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