I doubt many 90s desktop apps were designed around the expectation that the Turing Complete programming logic behind them could be explicitly disabled by the user.
And exactly what 90s desktop app had a menu that looked quite like that? Platform's then supported cascading popup menus with titles and icons rendered in native GUI chrome, ala the Windows 95 Start Menu. Any more flexibility required a lot of "low-level (whatever) diddling".
"Browser" incompatibilities are not much of a thing when you are developing for a platform provided by just a single vendor. But go ahead and try to port a Win95 app to OS7, you'll soon be longing to deal with the minor incompatibilities between different browsers (and yes, it's 2018, you don't need jQuery shims to reliably add two numbers together anymore).
CSS has long supported cascading popup menus without the need for any Javascript and browsers have long supported that CSS in a standards compliant way. Yes, if you really want some Win95 style menus you'll have an easier time in Visual Basic, but for most everything else it will be nearly impossible.
The webstack is not ideal by any means, but to suggest that it is somehow worse than win32 programming or easier to create responsive good looking apps in classic VB requires some mighty fine rose-colored-glasses.
I'm not proposing we go back to desktop apps as done in Windows et al. I'm proposing an open-source network-friendly GUI standard be created, or at least experimented with to test the power and limits of.
I suggest it be coordinate-vector based, and any layout and "flow" decisions be done on the server. Yes, if you resize your screen it would be slower than client-side re-flowing, but would simplify the client-side greatly, making it mostly a dumb vector plotter. Fat clients led to fat problems. Shift more to the server so you are using and testing with one render engine instead of the 50+ that browser brand/version combos result in. 1 < 50.
And exactly what 90s desktop app had a menu that looked quite like that? Platform's then supported cascading popup menus with titles and icons rendered in native GUI chrome, ala the Windows 95 Start Menu. Any more flexibility required a lot of "low-level (whatever) diddling".
"Browser" incompatibilities are not much of a thing when you are developing for a platform provided by just a single vendor. But go ahead and try to port a Win95 app to OS7, you'll soon be longing to deal with the minor incompatibilities between different browsers (and yes, it's 2018, you don't need jQuery shims to reliably add two numbers together anymore).
CSS has long supported cascading popup menus without the need for any Javascript and browsers have long supported that CSS in a standards compliant way. Yes, if you really want some Win95 style menus you'll have an easier time in Visual Basic, but for most everything else it will be nearly impossible.
The webstack is not ideal by any means, but to suggest that it is somehow worse than win32 programming or easier to create responsive good looking apps in classic VB requires some mighty fine rose-colored-glasses.