Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"
Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"
Posted Nov 13, 2024 7:00 UTC (Wed) by oldtomas (guest, #72579)Parent article: Anaconda’s new "Web UI" (Fedora Magazine)
Sometimes you have to hit a "save" (or "apply changes", or "wopp"...) button, sometimes things take effect immediately. Sometimes the "right" field has focus when the window is focused, sometimes you've to click on it. Sometimes TAB cycles the focus through meaningful fields, sometimes things get selected you never knew they were going to accept input (to be fair, often they didn't know either). Arrow keys sometimes do things, sometimes do other things. The slash key sometimes finds-in-page, sometimes it sets of a hellish machinery whose back-end is typically some misconfigured Elasticsearch (I know, I know: it is being replaced by some misconfigured OpenAI).
The cynic in me thinks this introducing anomie [1], to keep users confused and thus, powerless.
Posted Nov 13, 2024 15:01 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (4 responses)
tldr; I don't know if I have a coherent thought here or just some random tangents until the coffee kicks in...
Man, I hear you, this is also a peeve of mine, although with the web platform there is less expectation of common HCI so that its less annoying (for me) when every app does it's own thing, and there is a monumental amount of effort put into attempts to standardize (with tools like Bootstrap, conventions such as hamburger menus, and all the work on accessibility supported by browsers) because the platform just provides a mechanism and doesn't really impose or even incentivize any particular guidelines (again, reminds me of X11 and the differences between xfig, xman, xv, LibreOffice, Krita, and Nautilus for example). I appreciate some of the modern desktop environments attempts to standardize their own apps behavior, although the days of an all-powerful HIG, with thoughtful testing and research behind it, seem to have passed. Back in the day when GUI apps were mostly tied to their platform toolkits (Win32, Carbon/Cocoa) there was more incentive for apps to use the same widgets and guidelines and get standardized behavior "for free", which made it more noticeable when something like Win98 shipped and came with at least 4 slightly different versions of the platform toolkit because the Win9x, WinNT, MSIE, and MSOffice teams all decided to fork the widget set to customize it in their own ways plus support for Win3x, so you could open 5 different apps and have 5 different File::Open dialogs between them, some of which didn't get normalized until the Win8/10 team tried to pave it over. In the Unix world GNOME and KDE are as different as Windows and MacOS and can be thought of as wholly different platforms that happen to run on the same system, and I'm enjoying (sarcastically) how we are speed-running all the issues with X11 that caused ICCCM to be necessary to negotiate with Wayland protocol extensions, probably more of a reflection on how development across an industry of different competing/cooperating entities without a top-down hierarchy to coordinate must function, rather than a failing that can be fixed.
Posted Nov 15, 2024 7:59 UTC (Fri)
by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
[Link] (3 responses)
Currently working on that myself :)
I wasn't so much about the "classical" GUIs. They had their "wars" back then. but the dust seems to have settled so far that someone coming from a Gnome environment can navigate a KDE app and vice-versa.
It's the repeat of this anti-pattern in a far more perverse and toxic way in the Web "GUI" space which has me up in arms. For one, the diversity of frameworks is stunning; then, quite a few of them are pushed by big actors making their money from user control; and third, the half life of the framework du jour is counted in half-decennia.
To me, it looks as if, for some actors, the resulting user confusion is seen as an asset.
What miffes me most is that free software activists uncritically take over those antipatterns.
Posted Nov 15, 2024 14:05 UTC (Fri)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
Don't worry, when they get older, they'll see the errors of their ways ... we were like that when we were younger.
The problem is that youngsters "absorb", they don't learn. Once you start having to consciously learn all this stuff, you suddenly realise that it's taking you longer and longer, and at some point the time taken to learn exceeds that said half-life ... whoops ...
I'm very much hitting that barrier now, exacerbated by the fact that so much of this tech doesn't interest me, so I'm forced to learn it on behalf of other people (who are ill/old and incapable of learning), so I have to re-learn it EVERY time I try and use it. What a waste of time ... and the youngsters can't even understand the problem !!! That's the really infuriating thing !!!
"For those without a smart-phone, there's an app for that" - yes I REALLY DID see that in one of my company's internal FAQs ...
Cheers,
Posted Nov 15, 2024 14:51 UTC (Fri)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (1 responses)
This is all a tangent, but I've read a lot of what Alex Russel has to say about React and the whole client-side rendered JavaScript HTML/CSS ecosystem and how the uncritical adoption of this technology, lead by the advocacy of developers at Facebook, has done a disservice to the web by focusing so much of the development ecosystem around tools which are only really useful for a small number of cases encountered by large companies with large scale and large development teams, but because its "what the big boys use" it's become pervasive for general use cases that would be better served by a traditional Django/Rails app running on a server with normal HTML templates but instead are written as another React SPA doing everything over a REST API using micro-services on a Kubernetes cluster, which is an order of magnitude more complex to maintain.
> To me, it looks as if, for some actors, the resulting user confusion is seen as an asset.
I don't understand what their incentive has been for the endless rewrites, job security maybe. As far as the diversity of UI that seems to just be creativity without constraint of a HIG or an accepted community of practice for what is good that's consistent.
That all said, the use of a self-contained SPA WebUI that talks to a backend service for the Anaconda installer with a kiosk-mode Firefox for graphical display seems a perfectly reasonable use-case for SPA tech, especially since so much of the work is already done to support Cockpit, it's the traditional interactive forms-based client/server database apps which are a poor fit.
Posted Nov 15, 2024 19:28 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
I recommend not reading about React, but using it yourself. It really is a revolutionary approach to the UI, far increasing productivity.
People are now using React-based approach for text UIs: https://github.com/dino-dna/react-tui
Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"
Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"
Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"
Wol
Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"
Oh, great, yet another browser "GUI"