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by DrScientist 397 days ago
> HTML is almost frozen in carbonite.

Not really - there are pretty big escape hatches - you can do pretty much anything in canvas, custom elements allows you to define your own elements with their own behaviour.

I'd say the problem is the opposite - one of the reasons desktop apps from 20-30 years ago ( say MacOS 7 ) where great from a user perspective is pretty much all apps looked and worked in the same way, using the same UI toolkit and the same UI principals. And from a developer perspective - a lot of the key decisions had already been made for you.

The web of today is a zoo of UI styles and interaction modes.

The problem isn't so much a lack of innovation or possibilities, but perhaps rather the opposite.
1 comments
int_19h 397 days ago
It's both, really. HTML makes it really easy to do "corporate branded" fancy buttons, but you still have to jump through hoops to do something that could be done with a database and the stock data grid widget in <10 lines of code in VB or Delphi.
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DrScientist 397 days ago
Are we really comparing 2 tier to three tier here? ( With the web effectively 3 tier by default ).

That old VB code that queried the database directly wouldn't work well over a non-local network.

ie there is a bit of apples and oranges comparison here.

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yCombLinks 397 days ago
How it talks to the backend is irrelevant here. That has zero to do with the fact that the DOM was imply not designed for dynamic application layouts.
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DrScientist 397 days ago
Sure DOM is retained mode graphics - however as I said, if you want to immediate mode - then canvas is available.
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int_19h 397 days ago
You do have a point, but then again, think about how many corpnet apps are web apps these days, even though the network is local.
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DrScientist 396 days ago
Sure.

You also might not need any access control, network traffic security, cross platform deployment, instant install, evergreen updating, trivial UI integration ( links ) etc etc.

If you really want something simple you could use Excel, Access or Filemaker as a front end.

I agree life has got more complex - and in some cases unnecessarily so - case in point it's becoming increasingly hard to write web apps without SSL - even if you don't need it.

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