Everything good about Python except GUI IDE?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2016-02-29, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:43 AM, Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> On 2016-02-29, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Abjuring JS may be a virtue (or at least, making it a non-critical
>>> part of your web site),
>>
>> Except the marketing people who decide on the requirements will never,
>> ever settle for what you can do with plain HTML/CSS.
>>
>> In my experience, HTML/CSS makes a pretty awful GUI for a non-trivial
>> application.  With some Javascript and sweat, you can almost make it
>> to mediocre.
>
> That's why I said "may be". A pure CGI web site is pretty annoying
> unless it's really brilliantly done. However, I prefer to see JS
> restricted to actual interaction, instead of making it critical to the
> basic layout.

Agreed. That's an excellent rule to follow.  The introduction of the
"flex" display type in CSS has (for me) completely eliminated the need
for JS to concern itself with display and layout (other than the basic
hide/show enable/disable of optional elements as part of an
application's interaction logic).

I don't know why it took so long for CSS to grok the basic idea that
you almost always want to specify that some blocks should
expand/contract to fill available space and some should remain at
their "natural" size.  GUI toolkits and markup languages like LaTeX
seem to have understood that this was a very basic need for many
decades, but there was never a clean, reliable way to do it CSS until
recently.

> A lot of web sites these days load nothing but a script
> that goes and loads everything else, while you gaze at a splash
> screen. IMO that's unideal.

:)

"Unideal" is too kind -- I would described it as something more like
"the evil spawn of brain-dead incompetents".  I often wonder what
sequence of decisions/accidents get people to "solutions" like that.

> However, even that is probably a losing battle. :(

At least the era of using giant tables full of fragements of a single
large gif image to do page-layout seems to have died a long-overdue
death...

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! does your DRESSING
                                  at               ROOM have enough ASPARAGUS?
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