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Houdini.how

houdini.how

52 pointsyougoo30 comments

The "is houdini ready yet?" section is dishonest even though it's factually correct. And this shows that Chrome is the new IE.

If you're not careful, you may come away reading that "is houdini ready yet?" section thinking it's mostly supported by most browsers except for some laggards like Webkit and Firefox. Except that, if you exclude those two, the rest of the browsers displayed in the chart are basically Chrome forks.

Normally in the past, something like this would have been packaged as some "Google experiment", but now their "blink engine" trojan horse has penetrated other browser vendors, they are using that to paint a misleading picture to push their agenda.

Just to be clear, sure this technology is cool, but this is defacto "Google chrome experiment", not a web standard supported by various independent browsers. It's basically Chrome and other small fish browsers that depend on Chrome. Google should stop misleading the public about browser support of whatever they're releasing. It's dishonest.

On the other hand, I really think time is ripe for the next disruption of web browsers.

The new IE is Edge, which isn’t a small Fish either

What i meant by small fish is, they depend on Blink engine. They have to follow whatever Chrome does.

When someone writes "X is the new IE," they don't mean it's the new browser from Microsoft, they mean one of two things:

1) "X" dominates browser market share to such a degree that many developers won't bother testing in any others, as IE once did. That could describe Chrome, especially if you include other Chromium-based browsers, like Edge.

2) "X" is lagging in support of web standards and holding back use of those standards by developers. That second claim doesn't fit Chrome well, it's more typically used against mobile Safari. The combination of mobile Safari's share of mobile traffic, relatively slow feature release pace particularly for features in certain segments (PWA), its exclusivity on Apple mobile devices, and the longevity of said devices makes the claim somewhat accurate though still far from the miserable standard set by IE.

Don’t forget

3) That dominance is used to break standards and push “new features” that only work in X, forcing web designers to buy in or lose viewers

I find it hard to compare Chrome to IE.

Except for their similarity in its market share dominance, they are nothing alike really.

Chromium is open-source, developer friendly and progressive. The Old IE is just not the same

At least for paint, there are equivalents in other browsers. -webkit-canvas serves the same purpose in Safari as paint worklets do in Chromium.

Standardizing these APIs is a good thing, because it empowers people to make use of them.

Looks like there's a polyfill that lets you use the same paint worklet across the major engines: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/css-paint-polyfill

I dunno. The Houdini concept has been around for a few years now and has been positively received. The W3C draft has contributions from Google, Apple and Microsoft.

"Houdini is a group of APIs that give developers direct access to the CSS Object Model (CSSOM), enabling developers to write code the browser can parse as CSS, thereby creating new CSS features without waiting for them to be implemented natively in browsers."

It's kind of ironic that an API designed to bypass shortcomings in browser implementations is itself not implemented in non-Blink browsers (yet). Of course that's the route any spec takes, I just find it a bit funny.

Support status can be found here. https://houdini.how/about

Spec drafts if anyone is interested. https://drafts.css-houdini.org/

Can we stop allowing titles that are just the URL or some code name for a project? It forces you to click on the link to know what the website is about.

In case this gets fixed: the title of this post as of writing is just the URL right now.

Why don't you just flag it and move on? Why even click on the link?

Not trying to be combative or argumentative. genuinely curious

I did flag, but it usually doesn't do anything. At least on here I might be able to get a response from dang or something about why it happens so often.

I find that it usually helps, but it is also not instant. So now the post is being shown as flagged now. I do it a lot with spam/click bait posts.

I thought this was going to teach me how Houdini did some of his magic tricks :(

Yep, needs a title

"Houdini is a set of low-level APIs that exposes parts of the CSS engine, giving developers the power to extend CSS by hooking into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine. Houdini is a group of APIs that give developers direct access to the CSS Object Model (CSSOM), enabling developers to write code the browser can parse as CSS, thereby creating new CSS features without waiting for them to be implemented natively in browsers."

I thought this was a page about the procedural 3d graphics software Houdini :(

Incidentally, this turned out exactly what I had hoped it to be. :)

Or a tutorial collection for the Houdini 3D modelling tool:

https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

That’s exactly what I was hoping it would be. Amazing tool, I’d recommend it to any coders looking to learn to do hard surface 3D modeling

Me too.

To that end; if you aren't a magician and have no interesting in becoming one, do yourself a favor and don't try to figure out how a trick is done. You don't look at The Mona Lisa and yell, "That's not a real picture, he used paint to create it!" Not only is that rude to the magician but it ruins it for yourself. Appreciate and enjoy the art for what it is.

Same!

me too, it was a disappointment no magic :(

> Houdini is a set of low-level APIs that exposes parts of the CSS engine, giving developers the power to extend CSS by hooking into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine. Houdini is a group of APIs that give developers direct access to the CSS Object Model (CSSOM), enabling developers to write code the browser can parse as CSS, thereby creating new CSS features without waiting for them to be implemented natively in browsers.

O_O

I'm a bit confused by the about and usage page. Is this natively supported in Blink and you need the Javascript to polyfill other browsers, or do you always need their JS library to use this type of CSS?

I think only the other browsers need a polyfill. I just opened the dev console in Chromium and started typing `CSS.paintWorklet` (part of the proposed CSS Paint API) and it's available.

Yes. Houdini lets you paint a layer via JavaScript. The only link with CSS is that you call the Houdini module from CSS and pass some properties.

Houdini is one of the potential game changers out there. I'm watching the spec progressing and the implementations getting ready for years. Its amazing, but its another step of turning every website into an application, i.e., requiring JS.

Also its something that make things like React a little less relevant, by providing a powerful api which will perform much better.

Not sure this is the case - Houdini is about styling, while React (vdom) is about making a DOM out of some state. Is something "surpasses" React then these are the vdom-less temlating libraries.

looks cool!

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