Re: UX gap, was Re: How can HTML5 compete with Native?

On Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 10:45 PM, Tobie Langel wrote:

> On Wednesday, October 23, 2013 at 7:12 PM, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> > > These different library/frameworks also don't work together at all.
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > I don’t think that’s necessarily true (though it may be true in general). For instance, Topcoat is built specifically to just provide the UI components and to be model and controller agnostic. I don’t know how well it achieves this, but at least that’s the sell.
> >  
> > I know that the guys from PhoneGap encourage people to use handlebars together with Topcoat + require + jQuery. For example:
> > https://github.com/ccoenraets/phonegap-day-eu/tree/master/part08-final/
>  
>  
>  
> Yeah, the verticals work. But now try integrating a product that has been partially using Bootstrap with one using Topcoat. You're in for a world of pain.
>  
Yep. That would not be fun. I don’t have any indication how often this happens, though a quick search yielded this- "using jQuery UI and bootstrap together” on stack overflow (with 48 up votes and 45 up votes on the answer):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9048214/can-i-use-twitter-bootstrap-and-jquery-ui-at-the-same-time

The fix was to implement a bootstrap theme for jQueryUI as an open source project.  

https://github.com/addyosmani/jquery-ui-bootstrap

Anyway, the point being that a lot of these problems can be worked around by clever devs on things like Github, because the platform already provides flexibility to do so.  

The more fundamental thing is what you say about primitives below.  

> > > So if you've picked library A and need a component x of library B, you're either bound to re-implement it, or will end up bloating your app by adding both libs to it (plus you might bump into weird compat issues).
> >  
> > Yeah, can see that happening. But, at the same time, it’s should be seen as a good thing that developers have a great deal of choice in what frameworks they use to build their apps. This is at least what we want with regards to the extensible web manifesto.
>  
>  
> If you look at the two most popular trends in WebDev of the last decade (Rails and node.js) you'll see that the first one was strongly opinionated about reducing choice (convention over configuration) and the second one adamant about building highly composable components through standardizing on the right set of primitives.
>  
> Choice is good as long as it doesn't pigeonhole you.

On the platform, we’ve generally agreed to take the primitives approach. This should hopefully make it easier to identify if there are any UI primitives missing (when compared to those provided natively). I think that’s the most interesting thing that would be worth while exploring.

Received on Wednesday, 23 October 2013 22:00:29 UTC