Hacker News Reader

I don't see how that makes any sense at all. What is the actual limiting factor?

That's actually the limiting factor, otherwise you could just compile Qt to WASM and draw to a canvas.

To render text nicely you need to know the geometry of the screen so you can anti-alias properly. A canvas goes through a series of transforms that work fine for images but garble text.

The look of the text is just the tip of the iceberg. Many text editing operations are tightly integrated with the operating system and impossible to implement without an editable element. For example, on recent iPads you can move the cursor around by swiping the keyboard with two fingers. I don't know how you'd support this gesture without creating an actual editable element on the page.

Qt can be compiled to WASM and the resulting demos were looking good to me. Where did you experience problems with canvases?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com