Ask HN: Survey alleged cause of web UI standards pain

1 point

3 years ago

Many who have used a variety of tools agree that web UI's are a royal pain[1] to program, and that the industry should work together to rescue us from the Swiss Army Rocket Spaghetti that is modern browser web standards. But nobody agrees on where exactly the problem lies and how to fix it. Is the bottleneck DOM, JavaScript, CSS[2], out-of-touch W3C, or a combo?

I'd like to do a little survey to see what others think. You can list more than one number, but list the most important ones first.

Note, I'm not proposing the existing standards go away, only that we have alternatives or big enhancements.

Possible Solutions:

1. Good enough the way they are. Just buckle down and study more.

2. Should be split into 3 sub-standards:

           A) Mostly static documents,  
           B) Art/Video/Gaming, 
           C) CRUD/Biz/Data/GUI. (There would be overlap where applicable.)

3. Revive and improve something akin to Java Applets. (Perhaps same as 2C?)

4. Revive and improve something akin to Flash. (Perhaps same as 2B?)

5. WASM (If DOM is the bottleneck, not sure how this will help, so please elaborate.)

6. Try them all, competition will ignite better ideas. (I'm not sure it's practical to split and dilute R&D.)

7. Other: ____________________

Also, do you think most of the formatting & layout computations should be done on the client or the server? I lean toward the server in order to keep the client simple. Complex clients create more versioning headaches. The client may have some simple layout engines, but include a "dumb coordinate" mode to allow a server's layout engine determine positions. (HTML/DOM can't do direct text positioning correctly/consistently.)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/178uzpi/why_is_the_frontend_stack_so_complicated/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19021719