This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.
That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple.
> As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window
Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some automation is fine (e.g., how MFC resizes views in response to their parent frame being resized) as long as simplicity isn't lost in the process (I'm looking at you, CSS).
It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.
It's what I imagine a reasonable HTML/CSS would look like.
At which point you can basically throw the designer away, since you'll be writing code to manage layout for all widgets anyway.
My day job is to implement a commercial ERP system that has never been and probably will never be localized.
All software I use on a daily basis is English-only, even when localized versions to my native language exist, because:
(0) The translations are absolutely horrible. Who in their right mind would think that they are actually “helpful”?
(1) Even if the translations weren't horrible, the extra complexity simply isn't worth it. (Admittedly, my tolerance for system complexity is rather low compared to most other users.)
So, from my point of view, when you talk about localization, you might as well introduce yourself as a visitor from a parallel universe (where localization is presumably useful).
Go download NetBeans and create a Swing UI in Matisse. You'll find these issues aren't an issue. You can drag/drop and end up with a flexible, responsive layout that can handle things like strings changing length due to localisation. You can do the same with Scene Builder for JavaFX, although it's not as slick as Matisse. Or even Glade, if you're more a UNIX person. The latter two tools require you to understand box packing but allow for a relatively responsive layout.
The thing they don't do is let you totally change the layout depending on window size. But that's a fairly easy trick to pull off by just swapping out between different UI designs at runtime. There are widgets that can do this for you.
Exactly. At least 90% of the functionality of my forms-based applications use nothing more than the standard UI components Tk provided in the early '90s. Why the web of 2017 still cannot grasp this is unfathomable. To be perfectly honest, I've never seen any toolkit match the productivity of Tcl's Tk of more than two decades ago, and it's even better today:
