Comment by phtrivier
4 years ago
Sure, but I don't recall many programs / games / thick clients that would reorganize the layout of the application (adding or removing elements, reorganizing rows as communs, etc...) At least not 90s era windows programs, and certainly not dos.
Résolution was taken into account in games, to compute a scaling factor, maybe add some screen bars, and that was nearly all - fundamentally, because hardly any program was going to be used in a small, top to bottom screen at all.
So html was just the first one to have to do it pervasively because of desktop + mobile web browsing of the same source - but it could have happened before.
> Résolution was taken into account in games, to compute a scaling factor, maybe add some screen bars, and that was nearly all - fundamentally, because hardly any program was going to be used in a small, top to bottom screen at all.
Are you comparing applications or games? Because games don't have a fluid layout anyway[1], whether HTML5 or native application.
> So html was just the first one to have to do it pervasively because of desktop + mobile web browsing of the same source - but it could have happened before.
No. All the GUI toolkits I have used to produce native GUI applications since at least 1998 had support for ensuring that elements were still accessible after resizing[2]. Even in 1998, Delphi's "anchor" worked better than anything in HTML today.
HTML was the last GUI development system to get this sort of thing.
[1] You can choose one of a dozen preset WIDTHxHEIGHT resolutions. You couldn't narrow the window and still expect to see all the game elements.
[2] I don't remember many native GUI applications that were broken when you halved the width, or halved the height.
Hmmm, HTML has had layout behaviour that works at all viewports since its inception -- it's just that web developers have often implemented markup that that is inflexible. Just as you could make static/inflexible layout in any of the tools you mentioned, so could you do so with HTML. The regular flow of content on a web page has always been basically equivalent to "word wrap" (I don't know the proper term if there is one). The only noteworthy feature specifically regarding viewport resizing for web pages is "media queries" which wasn't necessary for ensuring a flexible layout.
It was always technically possible to have a flexible layout, it just didn't become popular/"standard" until around when mobile started being a popular medium via which to view that content. The prevalence "best viewed at 1024x768 or higher" was just a symptom of inflexible design & implementation, not an actual technical limitation of HTML.
P.S. I will definitely agree that laying out content in HTML has always been awkward, tedious, and inconsistent across browsers, hahah :)
One of web's crowning achievements, flex, was available in Qt in early 00s, if memory serves me right.
Do you remember a popular QT app that would turn a row of elements into a column of elements when shrinking a window, though ?
Was it also common to make sure your Qt app was working fine on the small portrait resolution of the mobile computers that were going to be invented any decade now ?
Flex is a layout system (a fairly good one, that I wish had existed on the web since the start. Rows, columns, wrap. Good.)
; responsive is a design considération (what do I as a human being decide should be visible when the screen is just too small to show everything.)
My claim is that "responsive" as a design issue is deeply linked to mobile computers, so it's not a surprise that it was not a big conxern before.
Boy do I have a story for you :-)
WriteNow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow was a word processor available for the Macintosh from 1985. Its windows could be resized from full screen (512x342!) down to so small that only part of one character was visible. There was zero reason to support windows so small other than programmer amusement. The interesting thing was that the scrollbars were perfectly usable at any window size, and changed not just their size but their layout to do so. From memory: at a normal size window, the vertical scrollbar looked normal: something like this:
^
|
|
v
At a smaller window size, the scrollbar got narrower, with smaller arrows. This made some sense.
At a still smaller size, the scrollbar shrank again, and the arrows changed shape to be smaller. At this point the window might be displaying two lines of text and the scrollbar was only 20 pixels tall. This was a pointless window size.
At a still smaller size, the scrolling area itself would disappear because the arrows began to overlap. This was a ludicrous window size.
At a still smaller size, the vertical scrollbar changed to horizontal, with two tiny arrows only a few pixels tall, and a teeny scrollbar between them. This was completely pointless.
All of the scrollbar designs were functional.
It did happen before, X Windows Athena and Motif used layouts, because no two X Windows Thin Clients were alike.
Same applies to Tcl/Tk and Java Swing that build on the same principles.
On Windows side, Windows Forms introduced layout manager, Delphi and C++ builder did the same with VCL.
Qt and wxWindows also have layout managers since the early days.
What happens is that people cargo cult how native programming used to be like, and youger generations only care about Web and mobile.
In the 90s we went from 640x480 to 800x600 to 1024x768 in fairly rapid succession, and Windows could be running in any of those modes depending on the user's hardware. Many apps were able to run in any of those responsively, though some would refuse to run without a minimum level.
> (adding or removing elements, reorganizing rows as communs, etc...)
The main reason you don't recall apps doing that is that it is a pretty horrible idea in virtually all cases.
Removing big nav bars and moving their contents into drop-down menus is pretty much the standard way of handling resizes across the web. Same goes for multi-column layouts. It would be a horrible idea to keep those things on a phone, just like it's a horrible idea to scale up a phone interface to a desktop browser window.
Having distinct layouts for mobile devices can be a good idea.
Having the interface add/remove elements for this dynamically is (a) obviously not necessary, as my desktop doesn't suddenly turn into a phone while I am browsing, and (b) not a good idea.
It seems like a neat generalisation, but it really isn't.
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