... this post perfectly encapsulates why I hate web development. A painful and easy to miss bug when trying to reimplement a GUI feature that's been available in every decent GUI framework for over two decades.
I really wish we'd gotten a couple more useful native controls back when there was any will to add that kind of stuff... It's sad/annoying to see all this reimplementation of simple stuff like comboboxes, and then all this extra effort to make it work OK in different form factors... The great experience of the select element that just gets you a mobile appropriate native UI for free is unavailable for so many simple cases.
Last I checked the form additions from HTML5 were still pretty spotty in support, several don't really have a real world use case, and nobody wants to make any more really.
The "problem" with native controls is that they might visually clash with the design of your website. That's why everybody implements their own controls or uses libraries like jQuery. And sadly, that's probably why we don't have good default controls.
That requires the ability to style things like the dropdown of the combobox (e.g. to add rounded corners, change the background/border colour), and the rows for each items (e.g. adding padding, and divider border styling). At the moment, that is difficult because they are not part of the HTML box model. And what about styling controls like date input or colour pickers?
Another issue is styling checkboxes to use custom images for the different states (including hover and pressed styling).
Web makes it super easy to build custom components compared to something like Qt, GtK or even UIKit. One of the reasons why web UIs are common is that people want more than tables buttons and forms.
I literally make a living tuning React Native shitheaps:
On mobile, as a rule, the second a design transcends things like tables, buttons, and forms is when the “lower level” native APIs start getting broken out.
Wrapped in nice little JS/TS APIs so nobody freaks out, of course.
React Native is not web, it’s the lowest common denominator of all platforms, so your experience is not surprising.
Having developed custom elements in both web and native, I felt that web was easier and more predictable than native. (For example adding clipping to images on iOS throws away most possible optimisations resulting in abysmal FPS) Of course the “best possible” UI is also slower and worse than what could be done in native.
(Also, on mobile I firmly believe that native is the right way to go with the current tech)
Not even a bug, it's one of the inner working things you may or may not know about. I see it more than a trap than a bug. Honestly, there are other parts of IT that have it, the most familiar to me is SQL where you can run the same query in 10 seconds or 20 milliseconds and only experienced DBAs can tune it properly, in many cases without touching the query itself.
don't agree at all. If the "native thing" came at an overhead, your hands would be tied. If the "native thing" didn't expose api for the styling you wanted to do, your hands would be tied.
webdev is incredibly flexible by the very nature of "build it yourself", and that's a good thing.
Having performance impact from badly optimized implementation is a testament to this flexibility - what you are saying is akin to "C is bad because i could fk up memory"
I am trying to implement drag and drop of raw text and html (html is mostly Vue components) inside contenteditable="true" to move it around. Like in a WYSIWYG editor.
It is insane how complicated this is. Then you need to consider the differences between browsers. Ultimately you have to start using a library. And integrate that library with the framework and then hope that the framework won't have a major technical overhaul like Angular or Vue had.
Most of the time you just sit there thinking what will be the best approach and start to get more demotivated the more you dig deeper into it.
It is hard.
CKEditor would have solved most of my issues, but their licensing is absolutely crazy. I'd have to contact them to get an offer to use it for normal internet usage, but if I don't know if it will work, and if the site will be a success, then it simply does not make sense to contact them. 37 USD for 25 users? Or getting a custom contract where I don't know how they will change it in the future? I don't understand what assumptions they have about the usage of their editor, but just embedding it into a blog or something similar, where you don't really know how many users you will have, definitely isn't one of them.
It feels weird to me that you are complaining about the complexity of WYSIWYG editors then proceed to complain the licensing cost of CKEditor which would have solved that very complexity. Wouldn't that mean the complexity of WYSIWYG editors is so high that such a business model works?
I'm not even sure if it really fits my case, since the editor would need to be able to create Vue components which maintain the reactivity. TinyMCE breaks all reactivity as soon as it "wraps" it all in the editor. CKEditor apparently has a way to do this (up- and downscaling), but there is the very unclear licensing issue. One active user is a user which has used the editor once in a month. So, for example, one which just signs up to check out the service and then does nothing with it ever again and doesn't subscribe.
So if I invest my time into learning this upscaling/downscaling issue, which can get complicated with a Vue component, all this in the context of prototyping the entire app, where the primary functionality gained by CKEditor the ability to enable drag and drop (move) of components as if they were pictures, it seems like overkill, since directly manipulating the DOM to move elements appears to be a a much more simple task.
I've made a test wit ondrag, ondrop and what JavasScript has to offer and it mostly works, but there are some small issues which I just can't resolve and don't know if I can resolve them if I invest more time in that direction.
So currently I'm checking out drag and drop libraries, which mostly seem to fit the purpose, but also have issues.
This is what I was getting at with my initial comment, that it's so hard to make these decisions if the outcome of the paths is so unclear. It's all a struggle between decisions and their tests which need to be made.
Assuming CKEditor would solve the issues for me, then the initial cost would still be to high. That would be different with a stable stream of income, but new services usually don't have that.
Free for up to 5 active users per billing period? This would be take 5 users to just check out the service and then that's it for the rest of the month. 37 USD for 25 active users per billing period? Simply not doable for me in the context of a startup.
> What is the minimum length of subscription-based software licenses? 12 months.
That's 444 USD for 288 potential users which wouldn't get charged more than 2 or 3 USD per month.
I'd suggest you to contact sales to learn the details of custom licensing options if you haven't already, also to make sure you're understanding the active users correctly for your case.
It still offers an open source option so you can test all its limits and see if it fits your case or not. Also if your project is not proprietary there is still the free for open source option in case your project is not compatible with GPL2+.
- browsers have had native text tooltips for at least 20 years
- there are active proposals intended to address richer tooltips and similar use cases
- adding new controls to the web is a complex matter because there are a lot of stakeholders to consider, and a lot of consensus to build among implementers/standards authors
- complaints about missing UI features on the web often overlap with complaints about standards bloat and browser bloat
- this article is rich in technical information that’s applicable more broadly than the tooltip use case, and maybe every single article about anything web on HN doesn’t need to be drowned in generic myopic complaints about the web
I see this comment on every single post about a difficult thing to do in web, but I never seem to see it in the countless articles that also show up about similar edge-case bugs in non-web development. Odd.
Same here. Got a job to do some java. 6 months later, I had to learn angular. 6 months later I was not in the company anymore.
HTML was not designed to be dynamic. There are too many redundant feature of HTML/CSS/JS, and honestly I would make everything obsolete and design a new document format with a open binary format.
Exactly. HTML was a document markup language. Articles, etc. Some forms.
We're now building applications. Applications have a totally different layout model. Only recently we're able to use flexbox. But it's insane. Just build the layout / application in something that really works (any of platform UI toolkits / markups), and use HTML for document flow.
You might be surprised just how fast 80ms really is. Again I'm not saying this shouldn't be addressed if it's causing noticeable issues but labeling it as a bug just seems strange to me (but that label wouldn't change the priority for me by itself)
It's noticeable if something is moving because that won't look smooth. But a 80ms delay will be very hard to notice. An average reaction time is around 300ms.
With all the downvotes I'm getting I might be missing something though :P
You're not wrong about 80ms being a "small" amount of time, but you're saying that in absolute terms. Native UI tool kits for decades now have targeted <100ms latency[1]. That includes processing user input and rendering. 80ms for part of a render operation spends almost your whole budget.
The sum total of ignoring this kind of performance footgun is why apps like Slack feel so crappy. You can't get into the flow because it's a pile of high-latency, asynchronous interactions. I haven't used Photoshop in a long time, but back in the early 2000s even on my Compaq with 32MB of RAM it was snappy. I can't imagine using something as complex as Photoshop built as an Electron SPA and keeping my sanity.
just because human's reactions are slow, does not mean that humans do not notice. In music it's routine to have people complain when latency goes above 15 ms and it was recently shown that humans could notice in some physiological way down to half a millisecond of latency.
It's very minor, but when it happen many times, it'll be noticable. It's proven because author start the investigation.
It won't be a problem if the tooltip has delayed appearance by 80ms, but it holds the process. So the site will have a 80ms stutter everytime a tooltip appear.
Which generally won't be noticed but it depends on the site. I'm not saying it isn't an issue just that I wouldn't call it a bug. Certainly not something so bad that it would turn you away from web dev. I mean we even have the tooling to track it down fairly easily
It's a bug. I don't care for your semantic separation of issue/bug and neither should you. Pointless distinction for the sake of ego protection. It is unwanted behaviour, therefore a bug.
Alright I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. For me, if an action takes slightly longer than it could take but isn't significantly impacting UX then I don't personally think of that as a bug. Maybe I just don't understand the impact this particular issue had
Last I checked the form additions from HTML5 were still pretty spotty in support, several don't really have a real world use case, and nobody wants to make any more really.