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by thrashh
1697 days ago
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I think it’s a funding issue. A lot of desktop GUI toolkits were funded by the people who created the platform themselves so they had every incentive to make it both flexible and consistent. When I look for a web component, the few component libraries that cover several different components are often extremely incomplete. Often they’re just side projects of a company or even an individual. No one is putting in the money to create something fleshed out. On the other hand, when I look for just a specific component (like a drop down or autocomplete textbox), there are sometimes very complete but because they are a single component, it has its own usage and styling conventions that are going to be completely different from some other component in my app. No one has the funding incentive of building a complete component toolkit for the web. |
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The lone exception are the base HTML components. I think the last actual change to those was making textarea resizable, and that's kind of a browser override to the spec as much as anything else. Essentially nothing has actually changed in form and UI elements.
That tells me:
1. The web is too obsessed with novelty to ever settle on one thing on their own.
2. The best group to actually establish such a thing is likely W3C, which means it will take 15 years and we'll have thrown two away as poorly considered before it's said and done. And it won't matter unless the changes would eliminate something as obnoxious as Flash.
That is still entirely possible. The web works very well, but it's still a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript. The one word I can think of that describes the state of the overall design is "asinine".