Why UIs are hard

Disclaimer: rant ahead.

The other day I motorbiked from Chiang Mai to Pai back and forth for about 6 / 7 hours. I highly recommend the trip it the landcape and views are stunning.

The next day I'm a bit exhausted so I am easing myself to some UI programming, you know drinking tea, being zen, trying to get into the zone. After 2 hours without an inch in progress, I am like fuck I'll go outside buy some papayas. While eating them I'm asking myself why the hell it is so damn hard to build sexy stuff with the dom. "Aaargh".

When anybody dares to talk about UI programming, they should acknowledge the big white elephant in the room, the DOM aka Document Object Model. We manipulate it with HTML markup, CSS and JavaScript. The first was designed for static pages, css for common themes, customization, colors, sassinness, then lord JS for interactivity.

A bunch of programmers donate (sacrifice) their time to build tools to make things easier, and yet the pain and frustration grows. So, how do we replace the DOM?

Is there any funding for that? Modern browsers are freaking complex, millions or perhaps billions already invested. Can we start from scratch? Or if we were to build from scratch how would we do it?

I mean seriously, you hear raves about AI, Machine Learning, blockchains, clean tech. These things are nice and powerful. But yet I have never seen someone acknowledge the pain in building a sexy / interactive site. Right now the answer is get money employ full time "engineers" to worry about that crap... A reality where thousands of devs wake up to tweak html, css, js and call themselves, "engineers"...

Let's wake 50 years from years from now, are we still gonna see websites as living organisms reacting to user actions or are we gonna sugarcoat even more.

I guess it could be possible but very hard. And I am talking about hard in the view of a single developer trying to bootstrap everything on his/her own.

How do we get to the point that the only thing you need is design "intents". All the rest is taken care of:

• You don't have to worry about the state changes in dropdown, button, panel, sidebar configuration
• You don't have twiddle with css or javascript...

By the way when you google "white elephant" you get the following definition: "a possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of." You can't get around the DOM but sometimes I ask myself "at what price?".

In South East Asia, white elephants are symbol of wealth and power, but I just can't see anybody getting those with the DOM without shedding blood and tears.

(EOR) End Of Rant: Guess what I'm getting back to tweaking the 3, yes with sexy tools that get transpiled to these 3 monsters. "Try harder" is screaming cause giving up is not an option.

Image by Kevin.