Comment by sensanaty
1 day ago
At minimum filtering and sorting should be handled by the browser, including async for both of those.
Pagination could be argued as well, but at least that's simple-ish to implement (but still, it's such a common UI pattern that it ought to be handled in a unified way by browsers IMO)
Look at how much effort has gone into just getting a stylable select box. Look at tooltips. A data grid is several orders of magnitude higher in complexity than both of these. You are severely underestimating the complexity of your ask. HTML/JS/CSS is not supposed to solve all your UX problems. It’s a toolkit for building UIs, not a framework.
Is it not the design by committee approach that slows down the design consensus on things like these? Just complex is it to design a spec for a stylable select box that is reasonable for most use cases?
If it has to take decades to agree on a design for a stylable select box, then there is something fundamentally broken with the approach.
For an open standard, how do you design it without agreement among a committee? Just let Google go rogue and define it? And have you ever worked in a large company? Have you seen how difficult it is to get any large group of people to agree on ANYTHING? These specs depend on the agreement of multiple large companies coming together. Each one of those companies is made up of many subcommittees who have to come into agreement with each other.
While maybe you could imagine a straightforward technical implementation (and I think you’re overlooking the complexity of getting the API right while making it extensible), the social engineering involved to make this happen would be Herculean. And it would be for an element that’s on less than 1% of web pages. If you really want a data grid, I’d suggest learning how to code one. It’s a fun challenge, and implementing basic features like sorting and filtering isn’t difficult using a modern framework. If it is difficult for you, then I’d suggest that it would be a GREAT experience to try. Then imagine how you’d make it extensible for unknown use cases.
The main reason it took decades for a stylable select box is because for two decades, we were just told “Don’t style select boxes. It’s bad for usability,” which was a mistake. We’ve only started to overcome that mindset in the past few years. The work on stylable select boxes only started in the past few years.
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