[lbo-talk] The extreme Google brain

[ravi]

On May 2, 2009, at 2:54 AM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
>
> But I do empathize with people who want all-Flash sites, as web
> browsers are terrible for attractive design. (Well, Internet Explorer
> is.) I mean, rounded corners which work on all browsers are
> nontrivial, as far as I understand! (It's not a simple matter of
> getting a Javascript or CSS thingie off the web: they don't always
> work on IE when putting arbitrary content in them.)
>

Yes, rounded corners is a joke: there is a CSS3 property "border- 
radius:" that has been experimentally implemented in Gecko/Mozilla (- 
moz-border-radius) and WebKit/Chrome/Safari (-webkit-border-radius),  
but Microsoft shows no intention of implementing anything any time  
soon. So people achieve the effect using images or crazy games  
involving tables.

Leave alone pretty thing like rounded corners and IE idiocies, UI for  
the web is hobbled by HTML's inherent limitation of being  
(historically and today) more of a mark up language than a layout  
mechanism. That works well when web pages are pages i.e., a document  
perhaps with an embedded picture or a couple of tables of data. When a  
web page is a structured interface with multiple types of data and  
controls, things start getting ugly. If you have ever used something  
like Apple's XCode to drag and drop controls to create an application  
(and I believe Microsoft's VisualBasic offers a similar builder) (*),  
or even the interface generator that came with Perl/Tk, you will  
probably find web UI development a bit of a step back, Rails/Objective- 
J/Capuccino/etc notwithstanding.

	--ravi

(*) and when these visual interface builders become too limited for  
sophisticated UIs, the underlying toolkits still provide a rich set of  
objects and layout managers to work with.