End of GUI's ?

Hello, First of all I'm not a Programmer so i can't programm anything in c++ or other languages but I'm highly intrested in starting learning it!

I come from the web-development, and everytime when I and the most of web-developers look at the programmers we have the same question, Why the hell they dont use HTML/CSS as Standard for GUI's?

There is an GUI war ongoing in the programmer scene everyone is thinking he is using the best one! But in fact no GUI on earth could be so good like a crossplattform solution with HTML/CSS.

In web-development we can code in the backround with every language in the front is always HTML/CSS. So my question is are you guys also thinking this will be the end of GUI'S in next 10-15 years?

I think this is the dream of most programmer's to have 1 Standard in the world and every device can open the GUI no matter in what language you are Coding!
Why the hell they dont use HTML/CSS as Standard for GUI's?


A couple of reasons that come to mind:

There are a lot of things one wants to do in a GUI that are difficult or impossible or wildly impractical with HTML/CSS.

If I write the GUI in HTML/CSS, I then need to provide something to interpret that on any given system - basically, a web browser. Many systems don't have them (the programming world is a lot bigger than a standard consumer OS running on x86 hardware). Tell me, how would anyone even write a web browser if the only GUI option was HTML/CSS? What would actually interpret the HTML/CSS?


There is an GUI war ongoing in the programmer scene everyone is thinking he is using the best one!

I disagree. It's far more common for professional programmers to advocate using the best tool for the job, given the constraints and requirements.


But in fact no GUI on earth could be so good like a crossplattform solution with HTML/CSS.

That's not true. A GUI written using the right tool for a specific job could be faster, could be more reliable, could be more adaptive, could be easier to extend, could be more secure, could use less memory, and so on.
Last edited on
The end of programming is when AI will do it for you.

In the mean time, why are using a GUI when you can use the command line ?
Oh, your probably one of those kids that grew up thinking using the mouse was a good idea.
You probably also run windows, and never worked on a mainframe.

The fact is if you wrote code in HTML on every computer on earth, the world would crash.
My estimate is that it would take about .2ms and that would only be due to the lag, probably much faster.

There are so many limits to HTML that they would have to rewrite the standards every month trying to fix something that HTML wasn't mean to do that no one would be able to have a standard build.

Sure, HTML has it's use, but it's limited. It's prone to bugs and compatibility issues now on different browsers. How do you think it would handle running as the OS on 10 thousand different pc's of hardware.



Last edited on
I cringe every time we get a tool that works over the web. Invariably:
- right click will be broken, due to some dumb browser over-ride that prevents it from being a proper menu or function.
- it will be 1000 times slower than a local program.
- it will be clunky, not supporting true docking and undocking, with clunky pop-ups that are hard to copy text from
- it will have crap that appears and disappears if the mouse moves just a little too far
- it will not match the standard windows or unix way of doing things on menu items, where to click, etc
- it will not have correct tab-stops to support efficient mouseless usage, forcing the inefficient mouse to be used.
-etc
- they will not support many, esp larger, screen resolutions and browser text settings correctly.

I love the idea of web programs but they simply do not work well at all in too many ways. I can't think of a single one I have used to date that I would have selected over a compatible local tool.

oh yea, one more:
- at least 2 web gui trash programs that i am forced to use at work have a HORRIBLE interface and design to ensure they look good on 2 square inch phone screens even though we are all working on DESKTOPS with big wide screens. It looks like someone ported a program from 640x480 to a 1900+ resolution --- with all the implications of ugly that go with that.
Last edited on
Topic archived. No new replies allowed.