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Comment by jagged-chisel | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a web front-end dev, so pardon my ignorance ...

Would a canvas and/or SVG GUI be acceptable?

Doing it with canvas / svg is a bit like saying you can do a videogame because you have access to webgl and web audio API.

In the most technical sense, yes, but it's way too low level an abstraction to be practical. Flash's entrypoint abstraction was the timeline, which already bundles up a huge amount of complexity around time-based transformation of content that you'd have to build atop canvas to approach Flash's convenience.

I haven't seen it work well. Part of the problem is that JavaScript is needed emulate many common GUI idioms, and the emulation or rendering is sometimes buggy on different browsers. It's back the the brand/version combinatorial explosion.

The industry really needs a dedicated GUI-friendly standard. Emulating GUI's keeps failing. If you fail 30 beauty contests, the blunt truth is you are ugly. Get a clue and change direction.

This is called “forms”. The people who are failing to do better do care—they just also see the limits of the work.

There's hope. If you look at the GUI for Figma (an Illustrator and Sketch vector drawing competitor), they've built it using the Canvas tag...and it works AMAZINGLY well. I don't know how they did it, but it feels more like butter than Sketch, and I love Sketch. I'm waiting for someone to come along and basically build the Flash equivalent of a canvas tag renderer. But it's going to take some serious smarts.

There is some precedence. Rich Harris (of Rollup & Svelte fame) has been toying with the idea of a precompiler for Web GL...

Context matters. If you're building essentially square box with interactions (essentially flash) , it would probably be fine.

But if you're trying to optimize across several displays HTML can re-flow for you and isn't generally terrible unless you're doing things that need to be pixel-perfect.

I believe we need 3 different UI standards:

1. Page and document centric (HTML may be close enough)

2. Productivity and data-oriented GUI's ("cubicle" stuff)

3. Games, art, and diagrams

Doing everything in HTML/CS/JS keeps proving too clunky. Even the big wealthy sites have odd rendering bugs that pop up.

> Doing everything in HTML/CS/JS keeps proving too clunky.

Clunky, sometimes sure. It has largely been fine in my experience.

> Even the big wealthy sites have odd rendering bugs that pop up.

This will always be the case.

Re: It has largely been fine in my experience.

That's not my experience. It requires too much fiddling and diddling to get things right that wouldn't be drama under 90's GUI IDE's. (Early versions sucked, but they got better with time.) Maybe a few experts somehow master all the arcane CSS/DOM rules, but that's the exception. Arcane fiddling may be great job security, but it's not economically logical on a planet-wide view.

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