> If the whole community effort was spent creating a better UI/UX standard (a standard web front end)
What do you mean by standard? HTML already has a UX/UI standard (technically standard and with some deviations in terms of design implementation depending on the browser). A <button /> is always a button and looks like a button in any browser.
The problem is that it looks awful if you are not Stallman. Both Android and iOS have been improving and refining (visually!) their UI elements, but this has not been done in the web, basically because there isn't a huge company calling the shots behind it.
If you want to improve that, we are heading in that direction with Web Components, but at the end of the day it's just an abstraction layer over the DOM elements. And I'm not sure I want Google leading the way (with Polymer).
> Both Android and iOS have been improving and refining (visually!) their UI elements, but this has not been done in the web, basically because there isn't a huge company calling the shots behind it.
I don't know about the other browsers, but Firefox defaults to displaying buttons the same way the OS does, so any visual refinement is adopted automatically. Of course the majority of websites override this to get full control over the look, which I find to be quite superfluous in most cases. The text field I'm typing this in and the "reply" button below it work perfectly fine without any fancy styling.
HTML has a UX/UI standard for iterating documents. Applications however, are not explicitly catered for. HTML standards for web application development are a bit like putting F1 wheels on a bus.
For example : a dashboard is a common interface pattern, but this would (and should) probably never enter the Document Object space.
I think you're preoccupied by the word "document". There are many ways that applications are catered for. WebSockets are of no use to documents, only applications, as one example.
The definition is extremely important as the current level of interaction richness was never really envisaged in 1996.
A document is a resource that is available specifically over http or https. An application is something entirely different as it can be served via a huge array of protocols and terminated and rendered entirely differently.
The separation of concerns here is my need, not the terminology.
For example, how much time have programmers spent globally repeatedly creating and implementing a user login and password reset flow?
This is simply not the concern of the Document Object Model and it means that we have to put up with a huge array of home brewed solutions that each have their own weaknesses. Imagine the same effort and logic applied to routers or tcp/ip for that matter. The internet would simply not work or break.
My point is - there has been a land grab over the UI / UX space that has meant standards like web components are marginalised in favour of 'frameworks' and compilers.
Seems like an awful lot of duplicated effort to reach the same result.
What do you mean by standard? HTML already has a UX/UI standard (technically standard and with some deviations in terms of design implementation depending on the browser). A <button /> is always a button and looks like a button in any browser.
The problem is that it looks awful if you are not Stallman. Both Android and iOS have been improving and refining (visually!) their UI elements, but this has not been done in the web, basically because there isn't a huge company calling the shots behind it.
If you want to improve that, we are heading in that direction with Web Components, but at the end of the day it's just an abstraction layer over the DOM elements. And I'm not sure I want Google leading the way (with Polymer).
EDIT: Some grammar.