the United States government has a UI framework and it requires Node and something called a gulpfile

so many of these UI frameworks have a main page where you have to scroll scroll scroll through “Design Beautiful Websites in Seconds” and “Pure and Responsive for Every Screen” and “Unbelievable Theming” and then when I finally get to the docs it’s like “okay first install Node. then install React. then install Floxjam. make sure your Floxjams are waiting in the crystal maze. now install Badgerset. copy-paste this config into your @npm-pkg/penguin-ghost/.badger.json. now install-“

maybe somewhere buried in the Bulma docs is a secret solution to this problem, or maybe a Bulma user would tell me that I’m not conceptualizing the problem correctly, but there are like a million other CSS frameworks that I could be using so I’m just going to move on until I find one that makes sense to me right away (hopefully one that doesn’t look “modern” or “minimal” or “clean” or any other words that techbros use to describe their bullshit. I want one that looks like Windows 98 with a dark theme, or 2000’s era Steam)

yep I just tested it and look at this bullshit lol

I am so fucking impatient for reddit to approve #GAGSProject already ughh. I genuinely can’t think of anything to add to it at this point? other than stuff that I really don’t have the energy for like testing it with a screen-reader or rewriting it to use Bulma

(which, tbh I don’t think that Bulma has the visual vocabulary for some of the stuff that I’m doing. I’m not actually sure how you’re supposed to use Bulma to make a UI that has sections within sections that you want to visually separate, for example. and Bulma’s card component seems like the best place for me to put a GWA post but it’s also so flashy and attention-grabbing and I feel like having 25 of them back-to-back on a page would look absolutely terrible lol)

I really wish that youtube had a feature like a lot of Fedi clients where you can blacklist certain words or phrases

the youtube algorithm knows my preferences pretty well but I really need it to stop recommending D&D videos to me. at this point I just want to forget that that system exists :/

Alt text for blind and low vision users
Alt text for low bandwidth users
Alt text for flakey Internet
Alt text for digital decay and link rot
Alt text for text based browsers
Alt text for calling out the relevant details you mistakenly assume are obvious to everyone
Alt text for explaining the joke to people that don't have the same background as you
Alt text for the 10,000 people learning something "everyone knows" for the first time today
Alt text for leveling up your own writing skills
Alt text for everyone

@tempest oh wow that is so impressive to me tbh. I’ve heard someone describe HTML/CSS as “the assembly code of UI design” and I think I can really see what they mean lol. y’all must know those two languages so well at this point to be able to use them without any kind of UI framework

@desea I might take you up on that! at the moment the UI is good enough so I think I’m going to leave it as it is, but in the future if I need to change anything about the UI I might just decide to rebuild it all from scratch with Bulma or something ngl - in which case it would be great to have some websites to use as inspiration

@rowan @desea oohh that’s really good to know - and I’m so glad that I don’t need Sass in order to do that either (parts of the docs made it sound like I did)

@emberquill thank you! that’s really good to know about Bulma tbh. and I’ve been looking through that awesome-css-frameworks repo and I wish they would distinguish which ones use JS and which ones are pure CSS. but otherwise this is really really helpful

@desea thank you! yeah I’m hoping that there’s some way to configure how it looks - especially the colorscheme. there are CSS variables now so there might be a way to set those to change the colors

okay so apparently the way that people make UIs in HTML is not to write all of the CSS by hand (which is a fucking nightmare!) but to use a UI “framework”

some of them look hideously overengineered (like MUI and Bootstrap) and require not just JavaScript but also React for some (hopefully good?) reason. but others are literally just CSS files that you include and they handle all of the fiddly bullshit involved in making a webpage be Actually Usable

so while I’m waiting for reddit to decide if I’m allowed to host my website, I’m thinking of switching to one of those which will hopefully make it much easier to add new UI stuff to #GAGSProject. the downside is that it’s going to make GAGS look like it was made by fucking techbros, (look at this website and tell me it doesn’t make you feel instantly uncomfortable) so I’m going to have to see if I can tolerate that before I fully commit to using one of these 😅

yeah

@rolenthedeep hot take, id be more appreciative of changes if they were really radical. Every computer has at least 4 cpu cores and some integrated graphics processing nowadays, so why not build a desktop environment that's literally a 3d mind palace you can walk thru like a game? Is it a good way to organize things for office work? No, and Im sure that's part of why the same office metaphors have stuck for so long.

Truly hot take
I have a little bit of respect for windows 8 for trying something in trying to make an os with consistent ui for both tablets and pcs. It failed in every regard, but i honestly think that if they had eliminated the traditional desktop entirely and forced themselves to make the new one work well without any fallbacks or cheats, then it could have been ok.