The problem with existing libraries that give you a dropdown is that you have not one but many such libraries and some will not be compatible with what your project uses, some are missing the feature you need, some are bugged. As an example the Search input in YouTube has a dropdown with suggestion, that dropdown got stuck on for me a few times , clicking outside it did not make it hidden, I had to reload the page. So google developers are incapable of creating a basic dropdown that has the feature where you can type and shows you some options. If there was a built in powerful enough dropdown then YouTube could have used that and not invent it's own broken version.
My point is give us native components as powerful as Qt,Flex,WPF , React, Agnular and others could use those or if they want can use DIVs or canvas , I don't want to remove you the option to use React or whatever.
The existing toolkits are not as limited as you think because you can most of the time override them and do whatever change you want , most of the time though you have enough built in customization that you don't need to do advanced overrides (I do not mean only visual customization, for example a dropdown can give you the option on how many items would be visible on the dropdown at once, a DataGrid can give you option about what columns are resizable, sortable and you can specify if you want a sort function for a column. And about DataGridView components, the native ones are implemented smart and can hold a million rows and have no performance hit because are smart enough not to create million GUI elements.
>Aren't you making the assumption here that GUI toolkits necessarily bundle a perfect implementation of this widget? Why would that be only possible for native GUI and not for Web UI?
Desktop toolkits are not perfect so if your designer asks you for super extra fancy stuff you can either extend and existing one or you can create it from scratch but for visual stuff just changing the paint/render function would be enough.
For WebUI, let's say I need a good dropdown, calendar, and DataGrid where do I go and get this components? If you say bootstrap those are too basic, if you say some React stuff maybe I am not suing react, if you link me to some Angular version N stuff maybe I am using N-1 version etc.
I think if you ask 3 developers to go and find me an X component for my framework Y I would get back at least 3 different results.
Other issue with non native components is that if you do not read the code you might not notice bad quality, components that do not clean after themselves or that run code each time you move your mouse around the page.
The existing toolkits are not as limited as you think because you can most of the time override them and do whatever change you want , most of the time though you have enough built in customization that you don't need to do advanced overrides (I do not mean only visual customization, for example a dropdown can give you the option on how many items would be visible on the dropdown at once, a DataGrid can give you option about what columns are resizable, sortable and you can specify if you want a sort function for a column. And about DataGridView components, the native ones are implemented smart and can hold a million rows and have no performance hit because are smart enough not to create million GUI elements.
>Aren't you making the assumption here that GUI toolkits necessarily bundle a perfect implementation of this widget? Why would that be only possible for native GUI and not for Web UI?
Desktop toolkits are not perfect so if your designer asks you for super extra fancy stuff you can either extend and existing one or you can create it from scratch but for visual stuff just changing the paint/render function would be enough.
For WebUI, let's say I need a good dropdown, calendar, and DataGrid where do I go and get this components? If you say bootstrap those are too basic, if you say some React stuff maybe I am not suing react, if you link me to some Angular version N stuff maybe I am using N-1 version etc.
I think if you ask 3 developers to go and find me an X component for my framework Y I would get back at least 3 different results.
Other issue with non native components is that if you do not read the code you might not notice bad quality, components that do not clean after themselves or that run code each time you move your mouse around the page.