I have to build a website. It’s a browsable repository of modesty complex structured documents largely represented as graphs. There’s lots of possible entry points, summaries, and views.
Fine. We know this will be sorta easy on the one hand and brutally suck on the other.
This is exemplified by the excellent table library I’ve been using, Tabulator.
I mean, out of the box (or in the demos at least) the tables look nice. They can sort. You can resize columns. You feed it some JSON and bob is all avuncular toward you.
Except.
Whoof, cutting and pasting the example code is an exercise in weirdness. It took me a lot of dork age to realise that the HTML5 doctype was essential, entirely essential, to moderately normal functioning.
And then there are the filters. Seems really nice…add a bit of search without any server mucking. Well, we jump from sorta declarative specs to a rat nest of bizarre (to these naive eyes) JavaScript barfing. Cutting and pasting example code yields disappeared table with no clue to what’s going on.
Plus this documentation says “source code” and then gives you something which is, at best, partial snippets, not working source code for the example.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s very cool and maybe if I was a wired in front end developer the documentation would make perfect sense.
But oy! It’s some brutal, empirical try and mostly fail to do anything.
As with so much web dev stuff, some select simple things aren’t so horrible then it fucking drives off a cliff of doom. It’s all so unforgiving and weird. Why isn’t there a simple “filter” flag? Am I supposed to make the buttons and fields or do they magically show up? If the form shows up why do I have to call all the filter functions? Including “clear filters”?
Maybe there’s some point where I’ll get it. But adding tree data was adding a flag and structuring the data appropriately. Adding filters is some mass of coding. It feels uneven to my untutored mind.
