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Ask HN: What are the fundamental diffs between modern web vs. desktop UI models

Roughly once a week, HN will feature a link to a new web-based UI framework/toolkit. These seem to build upon a history that, briefly stated, seems to go: HTML -> HTML5 -> JS -> Node -> React -> [ a lot of stuff ]. Obviously there are things that branched off at various points along the way.

As a purely native desktop application developer, whenever I read about these frameworks, they seem to contain almost no trace of any of the programming models/designs/lessons that were learned between (say) 1980 and 2005 in the domain of native GUI toolkits (both platform-specific and cross-platform). There's almost no trace of any of the vocabulary, but also very little sign of any of the fundamental concepts (widgets, "classic" MVC, etc.)

So I'm asking without (much) predjudice: what's so different about UI/UX in web-dev that justifies throwing away all these design lessons? Or are they really still in modern web frameworks and I'm just not seeing them?

22 points PaulDavisThe1st 5 years ago 22 comments

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