Let's Write a Toy UI Library

UI frameworks are one place where outside of toy projects, YAGNI doesn't really apply as much, and so things like focus systems and accessibility affordances should be factored in from day one. If you go in with the attitude of writing something "elegant", you're going to end up bolting these things on after the fact and writing contorted code to make it all fit together. It's like finding out that you need a skyscraper after building foundations for a cottage.

You can avoid this complexity in the base widget class by placing those elsewhere, e.g. FLTK's base widget class[0] is much smaller at around 500 lines of code (+ documentation comments).

[0] https://github.com/fltk/fltk/blob/master/src/Fl_Widget.cxx

> Am I being harsh? Well where's the tutorial that teaches people how to do it properly? Where do people actually learn the right way if not here?

I would love to read your blog post on how to do so! After all, since you seem to imply that time is free for everyone, you shouldn't have any problem making that blog post.

Well, I guess accessibility is one thing it skipped. It's a huge topic, I admit, so I'm not particularily surprised, but I think a better way for the author of this series would be to promote already existing huge toolkits that do have lots of functionalities built-in, including accessibility, like Qt for example.

That would be good also because already established huge toolkits have already answered a lot of important questions, questions which "modern" GUI toolkits simply ignore. New generations won't even know what we had when we were young.

Primarily because OP actually did call out accessibility as a concern. That is the opposite of teaching the reader to ignore people who use a11y features. Nor is it OP's responsibility to teach their readers anything they don't care to.

And yeah, where are the tutorials you'd like to see? That could have been a more constructive thing for you to share yourself instead of demanding it from no one in particular.

They also didn't include text rendering for scripts that are written right-to-left, nor for scripts that are written vertically.

Clearly they are not intending to provide a complete and comprehensive course on every aspect of the ideal UI library.

Rather, why don't you make your comment constructive and tell us about accessibility? I am sure there is an "accessibility for noobs" tutorial out there that the rest of us haven't discovered. I, for one, just recently learned about colour blindness in games and was absolutely mad when I saw what the example game in the book looks like to a colour-blind person. Not that I'm much of a designer, but I'll be sure to choose a universally-good colour palette next time I do any UI. So teach us instead of yelling at us.