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by jdjfktkrnj 1965 days ago
I've used pretty much all GUI frameworks - raw Win32, MFC, WinForms, wxWindows, Qt, WPF, native Android and iPhone.

HTML/CSS is vastly more powerful and productive, especially when using something like React/Vue.

It's not because "web devs who don't know anything else".

HTML/CSS is just a superior technology. No wonder that even traditional GUIs are moving this direction - Qt with QML, windows with their new Win10 flat design API (forgot its name)

> Basic layout of things in a way that copes with different screen sizes/orientations is a surprisingly black art sometimes.

It's still easier to solve these problems than in a traditional GUI, which if you noticed tend to have a mostly fixed layout, exactly because dynamic layout is so difficult to get right in them.
3 comments
virgil_disgr4ce 1965 days ago
So glad to hear this sentiment. It's frustrating that so many people don't seem to acknowledge how flexible HTML/Javascript is. It's not perfect, it's probably not the most efficient possible set of APIs, but it has to deal with a whole lot of legacy, just like most programming languages/platforms/frameworks.

Much of this conversation seems to consist of "the popular solution to this insanely complex problem is hard! Why isn't it trivially easy!?"

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jcelerier 1965 days ago
> No wonder that even traditional GUIs are moving this direction - Qt with QML,

QML (march 2009) is older than angular, react, vue which are all post-2010. And still they are all more complicated to use as a language

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mmcnl 1965 days ago
Probably an unpopular opinion but I wholeheartedly agree. I think HTML/CSS is excellent.
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jarek83 1965 days ago
Have the same feelings about HTML/CSS and even similar towards JS. I believe that if one gets a grasp of it, then CSS is extremely easy now, compared to like 5-6 years ago, where on top of CSS itself, you had to be good with all the quirks for IE and other browsers.

If today someone tells that CSS is hard, I honestly get stunned. I wonder if the idea of "everyone can code" might be root cause of current state. I mean - if after some time you cannot get intermediate CSS skills, then I'd say that web programming (and maybe any other) is not for you.

It was with the boom of Tailwind CSS when I started to see a lot of comments like "OMG this framework is great - CSS was always hard for me, now I can do much more".

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