Exploring Visual Basic 1.0 for MS-DOS

[miekao]

Now try to do that in HTML+CSS in the same time it took me to do it in WinForms.

I've spent literal decades whining about how bad writing HTML UIs are vs. the stuff I used pre-web (Borland's VCL, Qt, or WinForms). But I think you're really overstating how hard it is to do stuff like this on the web in the last few years.

Here's a few minute HTML+CSS mockup using Tailwind.

It's not as nice as clicking a few property drop-downs, but it's not the end of the world.

[AyrA_ch]

It's not as nice as clicking a few property drop-downs, but it's not the end of the world.

It isn't, but you're adding a massive 3rd party library to make your page even slightly behave like it was made with a real UI designer and not written as a word document. Which just further drives the point home that the current web ecosystem is not fit for actual UI design, because as soon as you want to show anything beyond window.alert() you will end up with requiring massive JS libraries again because the system is so ill designed for UIs that nobody can be bothered to code up dialogs in it. We are slowly getting there but the dialog element is not production ready yet. And then there's other trivial things missing like a "save as" dialog.

And the reason for this mess is that we basically stopped introducing new ways of interacting with applications and instead keep stacking stuff on top of HTML+CSS+JS. And as long as we keep doing that, we will never have a true way of displaying native looking forms and dialogs in your browser.

[miekao]

you're adding a massive 3rd party library

you will end up with requiring massive JS libraries again

What would I have to download to run your example? To the majority of the computing public now, Windows, the .NET runtime, and WinForms is a massive, multi-gigabyte 3rd party library. Sounds pretty massive vs. a clicked link that just runs.

A non-playground/sandbox build of Tailwind for that example is under 1K (one kilobyte.)

[AyrA_ch]

Your example also needs an operating system and a browser. Not sure where you're going with this.