In the olden days, you would be expected to use the UI toolkit provided by the OS, which was designed to provide a consistent and complete implementation of each GUI element, which not only made things easier to navigate for users but also provided things like customizable theming and accessibility features more or less 'for free'. Nowadays it's much more like a free-for-all, and every application is just a little bit different, sometimes on purpose, sometimes just by accident. Accessibility is a complete crapshoot.
The web is similar. The people pushing for using 'the platform' are trying to capture exactly the same set of advantages as the old-school OS UIs, as well as the additional complication that we have a much more diverse set of devices with UIs nowadays.
That’s still (IMHO) the best place to start.
You need to load the Python console to get the proper environment, and you can't just say logger.debug() to get a trace.
This is because QGIS runs in the Qt event loop.
Big cluebat: QGIS (qualitatively, and for the regular pythonista) is like doing everything via asyncio.
Ah, so: no wonder it's such a challenge.
You’re misunderstanding the terminology here. The platform being talked about is the World-Wide Web and you are listing three implementations of the client part of the platform.
There ARE ONLY THREE implementations of the client platform.
I would like for there to be a hundred, and there would be if the platform was simpler, but its not, so there won't.
A standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge. See also: AMQP, C++.
In any case, that is what happened.
And now new projects like Ladybird take a decade to arrive, even with AI, because of the immense amount of stuff in the platform.
> standard that's the product of feature competition between pre-existing nonstandardized behaviors is doomed to be huge.
None of the Unixes are this bloated.
Browser vendors couldn't see the future. Each was doing their best to stand out from the crowd with limited budgets and schedules. Hence JS being as odd as it is.
With hindsight it's clear it could've been better. And now with today's mono-culture there is an opportunity to drop some of the legacy cruft and rethink a modern web. Or even just slimmer Electron-like solutions using an ideal subset as better primitives.
I really wish something like FirefoxOS had gained traction. Because unlike Android, it could make native apps so much more open an approachable. In theory at least.
The web is uniquely capable (aside from raw OpenGL et. al) at rendering any UX designer's vision.
Almost all alternatives to the web that I've seen make aesthetic impositions, and are therefore non-starters.
The web has a gazillion libraries...
They basically want to squeeze every bit of performance from the things that they think don't bring business value so that they can afterwards burden these websites with every advertising, tracking, compliance, cool animation (from their POV), etc library and tool on the planet. Basically bloatware.
Why do standard libraries implement sorting and common data structures when they can be made from existing programming language features? The point of a platform isn't to expose the most minimal interface possible. It's to make it as easy as possible for people to use the platform.