Just use a button

I would love to see this expanded into "Just use the HTML element that was built for that explicit purpose". I feel like your average SPA developer doesn't understand what even a quarter of the HTML elements are meant for and just reinvent the wheel every time.

Yes it's called "just use the platform" and it's become a common refrain in the front-end world at least since HTML5 came out around 2014. Unfortunately it hasn't caught on in all parts of web dev but it's definitely seen as the "correct" way to do things

I wish the elements were just stylable, then. For example, the date picker sucks. I’d love to use it and eschew a JS based one, but my clients complain that it’s ugly.

I heard it almost a decade ago in Polymer and Web components circles https://www.polymer-project.org/blog/2016-05-26-IO-2016-Reca...

It’s strange to look back and see that most spa projects still just bundle it all up into a gigantic js file…

I vaguely remember, back in 2010, when I wrote my app, you couldn't style a button consistently across all browsers. They were grey boxes in firebox, or used other OS standard styling.

We had to invent our own buttons if we wanted it to look the same everywhere. I could be wrong though.

> I vaguely remember, back in 2010, when I wrote my app, you couldn't style a button consistently across all browsers. They were grey boxes in firebox, or used other OS standard styling.

I'm sure I'll trigger a lot of designers by saying this, but I'm probably not alone in valuing basic usability FAR above styling. I much rather have an ugly button that looks like 90's era Tcl/TK than something pretty that doesn't behave like I expect it to.

As an end user: I chose my web browser. I know how things tend to look in it. I know that this is not the same as how they look by default in other browsers. I do not care. I actively want it the widgets to look familiar, because that means I can readily parse the UI, and don't have to think about your design.

I actively do not want you to even try to "make it look the same everywhere", because the way you want it to look will in general be a way that degrades functionality for me. When you try, you send the message that you know better than me about how I want the GUI on my computer to work; and that makes me less inclined to use your site, and thus your product.

The great thing about using a platform as big as the web, which runs on a million different types of devices, is you can say "not my problem" and offload it to someone else.

When you're building a webpage or webapp, you're really building, like, 5% of an app. The other 95% is taken care of for you. You can always just say "fuck it, who cares if the button is gray in Firefox". Because you know what? Firefox might just fix it. And boom, you get the same result with no effort and no maintenance burden. And even if you don't, who cares? Maybe Firefox users like that and that's why they're on Firefox. All you need to know, as a web developer, is that the button does clicky things and is a button. That is a super power. We should use it!

> doesn't understand what even a quarter of the HTML elements

I’d welcome people knowing a quarter of the html elements.

Because in my experience, it seems like people only know 1 html element, which is DIV and it’s used for everything.

When IE died I thought for sure the path was clear for highly styleable form elements and tables with all the features that countless third-party libraries have re-implemented for every new UI framework that comes out. Now I don't think we're going to get there before I die.

At the time we were trying to get away from Flash and embrace HTML5. We would never have been able to compete against nice looking flash games with un-styled grey boxes.

Spoken like someone who's never had to interact with a designer. A designer will tell you the exact ratio the radius of the rounded buttons needs to be with respect to the height, and explain that this channels energy from the Earth's ley lines that resonates with the frequency of the vibrations of human brain waves, creating positive associations with your brand. And after hearing all that, the client will NOT be satisfied just bunging in Mozilla's standard gray buttons from the Windows 3.x era.

Of course I've worked in corporate world and with designers. And yeah it sucks and is stupid. Most modern software is really, really bad.

My point is that that is a choice. Not our choice really, but a choice in general. And we can do better.