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Comment by kodisha | Hacker News Reader

I was the biggest advocate of this approach.

Then, by chance I landed flutter/dart side project.

The power of language where you can mix business logic in presentation files is awesome. You can include your own or 3rd party clients and get full autocomplete and type safety.

The styling did feel awkward at first, but even I, being the first time developer managed to create pixel perfect replica of whatever crazy widget style our designer came up with. And using cols/rows made it easy to make app look good on variety of screen sizes.

I hope that in some moment in time we get same experience for the web, and I encourage more people to try flutter/dart, you migh be pleasantly surprised.

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But that side project was an app, I presume? The web is not an application platform per se. Web content should be rendered as transparently and accessibly as possible. Just imagine a world where you can't use browser extensions, screen readers, even text selection... To note, you can use flutter/dart and just have a web output (which works still fairly bad tho, last I checked).

"native apps" can be used with screen readers, and you can select text with them?????

Flutter uses a canvas rendering strategy where it’s painting all controls itself, so it’s not “native” in that it’s using controls from the OS, and therefore all a11y and select functionality is implemented custom.

Ahh. So its a bad app/framework then.

That really depends heavily on the platform and specific app. It is not there by default for most. Using canvas based rendering is pretty much as accessible as flash apps where, which is not much by default.

> The web is not an application platform per se.

It may not have been envisioned as one, but it certainly _is_ an application platform today. It's arguably the most popular most accessible application platform today.

> pixel perfect replica

How do you know your users have pixels and not, for example, screen readers?

Modern development is all about ignoring edge cases. If the analytics say that only 1% of users use something, they shave that functionality off. A natural consequence is that disabled users are ignored.

Strong IDE support is a feature of a vendor language? Not surprised. The web has a few good IDEs too, but as you're free to use your own compilers, linker, dependency management, etc., it's a little tougher to do this with.

While I personally think Flutter is a mess, shouldn't it be easy to port it to the web?

Dart was created as a JS replacement and for a time the Dart to JS compiler emitted code that was more performant than vanilla JS.

As someone who is just beginning to learn Flutter, I am interested to know why you think it's a mess. I've been a full stack engineer with a focus on backend for a while now and was just getting my feet wet with app development with Flutter. Is there something else better than Flutter I can give a shot? Thanks (in advance) for your advice.

Don't think there is a real alternative.

I personally prefer React-Native, but only because I know JavaScript and think flexbox is a really clean solution for mobile layouts.

Flutter draws its UIs in a custom way, which is the exact opposite approach that React-Native takes.

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