New opportunities for D => ASM.js

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/16/2014 8:57 AM, Chris wrote:
>
> Isn't it sad that we still don't have a standard we can rely on, a good
> one? Web development is really turning me off. JS, HTML/CSS is a
> compatibility hell. I have to use it, there's now way out, and I spend
> more time trying to fix things and finding work arounds than actually
> writing code. And the worst part is when your carefully designed code is
> being compromised, little by little, by work arounds you _have to_ find,
> work arounds against common sense and sanity. PHP is yet another can of
> worms!
>

I actually find HTML/CSS isn't hard to deal with if I ignore all newer 
features and "best practices" and stick to HTML4/CSS2. Any time I've run 
into any problems, I was always able to solve it by taking a step back 
and invariably realizing I was over-engineering something. Take things 
back to basics (and train your designer to know their mockups will 
merely be taken as rough guidelines), and all the real problems just 
simply vanish.

All the problems and incompatibilities and PITA are with the newer, less 
well-baked ideas and features. Developing on FF2 makes widely-compatible 
web apps easy :) (Although, I'll grant that "display: inline-block" is 
awesome.)

Well, at least all that *was* the case until I discovered basically all 
mobile browsers *insist* on completely fucking around with all your 
tables behind your back, *completely* ignoring all instructions to knock 
it the fuck off:

http://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/a-decade-plus-later-and-html-css-is-still-schizophrenic-crapware

But then again, in my experience (even just as a user), mobile browsers 
are horrid fucking shit anyway. Try going to forum.dlang.org on a mobile 
browser (*any* mobile browser), hit "Reply" and try to snip all but one 
sentence of the quoted message. You can't fucking do it. I've blown 
literally half an hour trying to do that (even going so far as trying 
three different browsers and installing updates, none of which solved 
things). And that was even *WITH* a stylus! (Or at least what passes for 
a stylus these days.)

But on a real computer it's freaking trivial - takes literally a few 
seconds. If there were an up-to-date PalmOS, it would even be trivial on 
that too, just because of the intelligent way text boxes worked on Palm. 
But on all this dumbfuck Jobs-ian style horse shit like iOS and Android, 
it's just unusable fucking crap. Damn things are supposed to be portable 
and yet it's usually *faster* to just wait until you get home to 
do...whatever...on a real fucking computer. It's no damn wonder everyone 
lives with their heads buried in their phones these days - it *takes* 
that fucking long to accomplish even the most trivial shit on these 
worthless goddamn Apple-style designs.

> When it comes to UI development, given the amount of platforms these
> days, I'd say a HTML/CSS based aproach is desireable. But connecting
> HTML to the logic, that's tough. I dream of the day when we can attach
> any language to HTML. Is it so hard?

Meh, spend a few minutes with Tk (for example), or any decent RAD tool 
(even Visual Basic, if you ignore the language itself), and it becomes 
very clear just how horrid HTML/CSS/JS are as a UI engine. (Not that I 
ever considered HTML any good for that purpose...)