[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 05:19:16AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> Most GUIs are made of common re-usable widgets, right? The "button"
> widget, the "checkbox" or "radio box" widgets, the "menu bar" widget,
> the "text box" widget, "image", "list", "grid", "treeview", etc. So
> then you make a GUI by plopping those widgets into a window, adjusting
> their exposed properties, and providing actions for stuff like
> "onClick". Basic stuff, right?
> 
> So if I take a text-edit control and plop it onto a window, I haven't
> recreated the entire GUI and functionality of Windows Notepad or Kate
> or Gedit or Eclipse or whatever. It's just a text box. No menu bar, no
> toolbar, no "save button", no "currently opened files list", no status
> indicators, no nothing. Just a box you can type into. You have to add
> those widgets in, and add code to make them cause the right things to
> happen to the text box widget (or as a result of the text box widget).

Ah I see. That sounds a bit closer to what I have in mind.


[...]
> > You're doing better than I am. :-P  I whine and groan about it, but
> > then very often my own programs are monolithic monsters. Hopefully
> > once I start having more D projects replace my C/C++ ones, I'll
> > improve in this area. D does make it a lot easier to design software
> > in this way, which is one of the reasons I like it so much in spite
> > of the current implementation flaws.
> > 
> 
> D is seriously so awesome. I had to go back to C++ for the iOS/Andorid
> game I'm doing, and man do I miss D
> <http://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/top-d-features-i-miss-in-c>.

I have one objection to your list though: although _for the most part_
AA's can work with any kind of key, there are a lot of bugs in that
area. The language itself, of course, in theory supports any kind of
key, but the current implementation is honestly a mess. I've tried
fixing things but one thing leads to another and nothing short of a
total overhaul will completely address all of the problems.

But still, for most common cases, D's built-in AA's are a big factor in
convincing me to switch to D. In this day and age, a language that
doesn't have AA's of some sort (that doesn't require 3rd party
libraries) is simply unforgiveable. (*ahem**cough*C++ prior to
C++11*cough* Can you believe that prior to C++11, true AA's weren't even
a part of the standard library? You had to use non-standard
vendor-dependent hashes, or settle with tree-based substitutes which is
NOT the same thing. What kind of idiocy is that?!)


> I miss D whenever I do maintenance on my Haxe-based webapp (one of my
> real-world projects). I miss D like crazy anytime I have to use any
> language other than D. It's so totally spoiled me :)

Haha yeah. In spite of all the current implementation flaws, D is still
the best language out there.


[...]
> > My own take on it is this: LaTeX itself is quite old, and its age is
> > starting to show. There are many things about its implementation
> > details that I don't quite like. Lack of native UTF support is one
> > major flaw (though there are imperfect workarounds).  Also some
> > holdovers from the bad old days of trying to squeeze out every last
> > byte from something, causing a zoo of command names that you pretty
> > much have to memorize.
> 
> Might be fun to make a front-end for it. Something that spits out raw
> latex given a modernized equivalent.

Well, there's a GUI front-end for it (LyX), I don't know if that handles
things like native UTF support. I was thinking more of a 21st century
rewrite of LaTeX that has modern support like native UTF, revamped
syntax to replace anachronisms, etc., but adhering to the original
design principles. Sorta like what Knuth & Lamport would've come up
with, if they had developed TeX/LaTeX in 2012.


[...]
> > > I do like HTML/CSS for documents, could be less verbose, could use
> > > to not suck at diagrams and math formulas,
> > 
> > Once you've tasted the power of math layout in LaTeX, you wouldn't
> > want to go near HTML math formulas with a 20-foot sterilized
> > asbestos-lined titanium pole. It's *that* bad by comparison.
> > 
> 
> Even now I wouldn't even bother. I'd just use an image, or if not that,
> then maybe try pre-baked MathML output. But you have convinced me to get
> around to trying latex when I get a chance.

Sites like Wikipedia use LaTeX to generate math formula images by
passing embedded <math> tags through LaTeX for formatting. :) Seriously,
that's what makes math even remotely tolerable to write in Wikipedia.
It's imperfect, though, 'cos the baseline of the formatted text in the
image often doesn't line up with the baseline of the surrounding HTML
text. And font sizes don't always match up. But it's better than the
horror of attempting to write math in HTML.


[...]
> > What never made any sense to me was the use of HTML for what amounts
> > to a GUI (*cough*form elements*cough*JS/CSS popup dialogs*cough*).
> 
> *Exactly*
> 
> The "JS/CSS popup dialogs" (I call them "pop-ins") are probably the #1
> thing that irritates me most on the web. Everything about it is wrong.
> Not just the technical things you describe, but the whole user
> experience even when it's *not* buggy. I mean, here we have a *popup*,
> that *can't* be killed by popup blockers, *and* makes the page
> underneath inaccessible! *And* it breaks the "back" button! Plus, on
> top of all that, it's completely unnecessary 100% of the time and does
> *nothing* to improve the user experience.

This is one of the things I like about Opera: I can switch to author
mode which I configured to override all CSS with my own. When I hit a
site with a CSS popup, either I just close it outright, or if I care
enough about the content, I'll either turn off javascript (which is
usually the culprit behind the CSS popup) or switch to author mode and
read it in what's essentially a poor man's version of plaintext.

This also works very well with sites with horrific choices of
background/foreground colors (like red on grey or yellow on neon green)
that make your eyes bleed, or microscopic font sizes, or b0rken styles
that assume specific font/screen pixel sizes that breaks on every system
except the author's.


> I had a *cough*fun experience with them recently, too:
> 
> I wanted to check the availability of some item at my local library
> system, but their site insists on showing the availability info in one
> of those "pop-ins". Ok, annoying normally, but I was out of the house
> so I was doing this on the iPhone (which took forever due to the
> barely-usable text-entry on the thing). So I finally get to what I
> want, get to the "item availability" pop-in, and it's too big to fit
> on the screen. Ok, to be expected, it *is* a phone. So I try to
> scroll...and the pop-in *stays in place* as I scroll around the
> faded-out page underneath. So I can't scroll the pop-in. So I try to
> zoom out. Oh, it zooms out ok, but the part that was offscreen *stays*
> offscreen, so that doesn't help either. Go landscape - that just makes
> it worse because it everything scales up to keep the page width the
> same, so I just loose vertical real estate.
> 
> Funny thing is, it works fine (ie without using pop-ins) when JS is
> off. But I can't turn JS off in iPhone Safari.

Argh... iPhone/iPod Safari is one of the worst horrors there are. The UI
is simplistic to the point of daimbramage, which makes it unusable for
anything but the most trivial of tasks. Nothing is configurable, no
privacy settings, can't control Javascript, the maximum number of tabs
is ridiculously small, scrolling a long page is really horrible, wide
images get clipped with no way to unclip them when using the mobile
stylesheet (probably the same bug you describe above), etc.. And Apple
has the audacity of forcefully banning all other browsers from the app
store, for the simple reason that they are superior browsers, and oh no,
we simply can't allow customers to have a superior experience!

About the only commendable thing with iPod Safari is the lack of Flash
(good riddance!).


[...]
> > I'm on the fence about multi-column though. I find that an
> > unfortunately large percentage of websites out there are overly wide,
> > with text that stretch way past your eye's natural comfortable
> > reading width, making reading said text a very tiring experience.
> > OTOH if you just clip the width to a more natural width you have the
> > problem that most screen these days are too lacking in the height
> > department^W^W^W^W^W^W overly endowed in the width department, so you
> > end up with large swaths of empty spaces on either side, which looks
> > awful.  Standard support for multi-columns would be a big help here.
> > (Preferably one that's decided by the *browser* instead of hard-coded
> > by some silly HTML hack with tables or what-not.) I think CSS3 has
> > (some) support for this.
> > 
> 
> The problem with that is you're creating excess vertical scrolling.
> Just to read linearly it's "scroll down, scroll up, scroll down", etc.
> (Of course, that pain is hugely compounded when the multi-columns are
> on page-based PDFs, like academic research papers.)

That's why I said that multicolumn support needs to be natively
supported in the browser, NOT hardcoded into the page itself. It should
be the browser that decides whether something should be multicolumn, and
how tall the columns should be. There's no way the author can possibly
account for every possible browser configuration out there to make this
kind of decisions.


> The root problem there is that the need for multi-column on the web is
> artificially created by manufacturers and consumers who have
> collectively decided that watching movies is by far the #1 most
> important thing for anyone to ever be doing on a computer. Hence,
> "decapitated fat midget" 16:9 screens for everyone! No matter how bad
> it is for...just about everything *but* movies and certain games.
> Which, I suspect, is also the main reason we can't have browsers
> anymore with nice traditional UIs - because they have to be
> shoe-horned into a movie-oriented half-screen.
[...]

I avoid those height-truncated monitors like the plague. I only ever buy
monitors with 4:3 aspect ratio. Seriously, if all I wanted to do was to
watch movies, I wouldn't be using a PC in the first place.

But still. Sometimes you have a long list of narrow items, and
multi-column makes it more readable without excessive scrolling.

Maybe I should start a new trend: side-scrolling webpages with
*multi*-columns. :) (Though this probably only makes sense with vertical
writing systems, like the vertical variant of Chinese writing. Which is
in vertical columns *and* read right-to-left. Bwahahahaha...)


T

-- 
It said to install Windows 2000 or better, so I installed Linux instead.