Comment by danShumway
6 years ago
There's little value in me doing this, but I always have to push back against this idea. This is the hill I'll die on.
Most application UIs are not complicated. Most applications are just interactive documents. There is nothing special about 90% of the apps I use on my native computer that means they couldn't be rendered as HTML. The document model is fine for applications. Preferable, even.
Heck, a reasonable portion of the native applications on my computer have optional pure-terminal interfaces. If your application can work in a terminal, it can work with HTML -- and embracing a document model for your application UI would be a better user experience than whatever the heck pixel-perfect framework that everyone is chasing nowadays. That's true on the web, and it's true on native.
The problem with the web is not that HTML is incapable of being used as an application platform; it's not that we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's that both web and native developers overestimate the interface requirements of their applications, and bring in unnecessary cruft to achieve pixel-perfect layouts that are worse for end-users.
We have a square peg, and a square hole, but we like to go to conferences and pretend that our peg is actually some convoluted, recursive star shape.
Thank you for writing this. I had this feeling that the document model isn't that bad for software in the first place (a feeling that I noticed when I prototyped some of the stuff I was working on in Observable, and realized the prototype in an interactive notebook format fits the problem more than the SPA we were building). But I haven't considered the implications. You might be very right that the document model could support a lot more than we give it credit for, if we just stopped pushing the established "appliance" UI paradigm.
If you're talking about "forms" as the interface, then sure. I 100% agree. But the moment things get more interesting, you'll fail. Video editing for example. Lastly, I believe that if forms suffice, you don't need any of the recent CSS features. Simple forms without css should be fine. So no panels, modals, popups, nested navigation or single page apps.