[tabtab]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The main reason we need bloated convoluted web frameworks with giant learning curves and a jillion gotcha's is because businesses want desktop-like GUI's and HTML/DOM/CSS/JS is ill-suited to emulate such, and perhaps stuck that way because fixing it will likely break backward compatibility.

Web is either missing or has screwed up too many common and expected GUI idioms: https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/10ze9hu/missing_...

We need a state-ful GUI markup standard. It perhaps should piggy-back off the Tk or Qt GUI kits to avoid starting from scratch. Let's practice industry-wide KISS, DRY, and YAGNI. Past attempts are YAML (too static & convoluted), XUL (too convoluted), and QML (too proprietary).

With such a standard, developing GUI/CRUD apps could be more like using Delphi/Lazarus or WinForms, which are faaar more pleasant than webshit, at least for smallish projects. ("Enterprise" may need different tooling. One size doesn't fit all.)

Recent related HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34696635

[nicoburns]

Web frameworks are complicated. But frameworks like QT are no less complicated.

[Ambolia]

I have never seen a QT application making chunks of text disappear somewhere between my keyboard and my screen, but the front page of google keeps randomly doing it to this day.

If google can't get basic text input right on the web, there's something very broken there.

[tabtab]

It indeed amazes me how screwed up the big dogs' web apps are. The web & phone version of MS-Outlook was notorious for about 2 years. They did gradually mostly fix it, but it was a painful journey. The limits of current web standards have to be part of the cause for this gap; otherwise having a mound of money to throw at a site would work. There are many other corporate apps I could make similar complaints about.

[account-5]

The proliferation of frameworks and confusion as to which one I should take the time to learn has pushed me towards dart/flutter as a solution for a cross platform GUI language.

Having said that I have been looking at htmx recently.

[jeremycarter]

I've been saying a similar thing for years too. Anyone want to team up to make attempt #27 at this problem?

[tabtab]

Excellent, I'm not alone in feeling something is missing from the industry.

I'm in the early stages of a proof-of-concept using MS-WinForms to write a GUI browser. Nothing special about WinForms, I'm just somewhat more familiar it and C#, and there's a lot of web help for MS tooling. The demo wouldn't be feature rich; just enough to get a feel for possibilities.

But in parallel, we can kick around what the "ideal" markup language could look like here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CRUDology/comments/112ly2i/gui_mark...