On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:52:09 -0700 "H. S. Teoh" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 05:36:48PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > > > > Newer Operas also got rid of the "native-ish" theme, which is why > > I'm not upgrading past v10. It may seem trivial, but skinned apps > > *really* bug me. > > Skinned apps don't bug me at all. I tend to like apps where you can > delete useless buttons off the UI and turn off toolbars and stuff you > never use. As well as configure custom keyboard bindings That's not really skinned, that just simply customizable (which I agree is good). What I mean by "skinned" is "Blatantly disregards my system settings and poorly re-invents all the standard UI controls." Often that's done so that users like me can re-skin it to make it look and act like *anything* we want...*except* for native and "consistent with the rest of the fucking system". > > > I find the UIs in the FF4-onward to be completely intolerable. Even > > FF3's UI was god-awful, and then they managed to make it worse with > > 4 by going all "Chrome-envy". > > What I'd _really_ like, is browser *library*, where you get to > assemble your own browser from premade parts. A "web browser control" is pretty common, AIUI. I know IE and WebKit can be used as controls that you just plop into a window. Then you have to add in all the bells and whistles like address bar, bookmarking, etc., which all still adds up to a lot of extra work, though. > Like replace the lousy > UI front end with a custom interface. Applications nowadays suffer > from excessive unnecessary integration. Software should be made > reusable, dammit. And I don't mean just code reuse on the level of > functions. I mean entire software systems that are pluggable and > inter-connectible. If there's a browser that has a good back-end > renderer but lousy UI, it should be possible to rip out the UI part > and substitute it with the UI of another browser that has a better UI > but lousy back-end. And if there's a browser that comes with > unnecessary bloat like a mail app, it should be possible to outright > _delete_ the mail component off the HD and have just the browser part > working. Software these days is just so monolithic and clumsy. We > need a new paradigm. > More like "need an old paradigm" because it sounds like you're describing the Unix philosophy ;) I'm with you though, that would be nice. > > [...] > > > The result is that people revert to using table-based formatting > > > and > > > > Hey, I *like* table-based formatting :). Beats the hell out of > > trying to kluge together sane layouts/flowing with CSS. And > > nobody's ever going to convince me that HTML isn't the presentation > > layer. > > I say trash it all, tables, HTML, everything. Markdown is good enough > for email. If you need more than that, go buy a real website and post > it there instead of transmitting that crap over SMTP. > Well, I just meant on the web, not email. Death to HTML emails!
