[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:52:09 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 05:36:48PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > 
> > Newer Operas also got rid of the "native-ish" theme, which is why
> > I'm not upgrading past v10. It may seem trivial, but skinned apps
> > *really* bug me.
> 
> Skinned apps don't bug me at all. I tend to like apps where you can
> delete useless buttons off the UI and turn off toolbars and stuff you
> never use. As well as configure custom keyboard bindings 

That's not really skinned, that just simply customizable (which I
agree is good). What I mean by "skinned" is "Blatantly disregards my
system settings and poorly re-invents all the standard UI controls."

Often that's done so that users like me can re-skin it to make it
look and act like *anything* we want...*except* for native and
"consistent with the rest of the fucking system".


> 
> > I find the UIs in the FF4-onward to be completely intolerable. Even
> > FF3's UI was god-awful, and then they managed to make it worse with
> > 4 by going all "Chrome-envy".
> 
> What I'd _really_ like, is browser *library*, where you get to
> assemble your own browser from premade parts.

A "web browser control" is pretty common, AIUI. I know IE and WebKit
can be used as controls that you just plop into a window. Then you have
to add in all the bells and whistles like address bar, bookmarking,
etc., which all still adds up to a lot of extra work, though.

> Like replace the lousy
> UI front end with a custom interface. Applications nowadays suffer
> from excessive unnecessary integration. Software should be made
> reusable, dammit. And I don't mean just code reuse on the level of
> functions. I mean entire software systems that are pluggable and
> inter-connectible. If there's a browser that has a good back-end
> renderer but lousy UI, it should be possible to rip out the UI part
> and substitute it with the UI of another browser that has a better UI
> but lousy back-end. And if there's a browser that comes with
> unnecessary bloat like a mail app, it should be possible to outright
> _delete_ the mail component off the HD and have just the browser part
> working. Software these days is just so monolithic and clumsy. We
> need a new paradigm.
> 

More like "need an old paradigm" because it sounds like you're
describing the Unix philosophy ;)  I'm with you though, that would be
nice.

> 
> [...]
> > > The result is that people revert to using table-based formatting
> > > and
> > 
> > Hey, I *like* table-based formatting :). Beats the hell out of
> > trying to kluge together sane layouts/flowing with CSS. And
> > nobody's ever going to convince me that HTML isn't the presentation
> > layer.
> 
> I say trash it all, tables, HTML, everything. Markdown is good enough
> for email. If you need more than that, go buy a real website and post
> it there instead of transmitting that crap over SMTP.
> 

Well, I just meant on the web, not email. Death to HTML emails!