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Comment by Hixie | Hacker News Reader

(I was previous editor of the HTML standard for ~10 years, now I'm the Flutter TL)

I mean... you're not wrong. But let's be honest, we never managed to really deliver on the web's promise here. It was <table> and <font> in the 90s, it's WebGL+Wasm now, but the reality is we've never succeeded at true portability (ever tried going to a non-trivial site in lynx? or a web app on your phone?) or accessibility (just ask anyone who uses a screen reader how accessible the web truly is) or customisability (have you _tried_ creating a user style sheet?) or interoperability (I spent a literal decade just trying to clean up the mess around HTML parsing and that was the success story!).

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Maybe you aren't giving yourself enough credit?

I just typed this comment using a plugin that gives me vi bindings inside the editor, on a page where I have increased the font size to 110% because I personally find it nicer that way.

All done without the permission of ycombinator and yet working perfectly with their web page. And this is not just because ycombinator has very basic HTML ... this works with at least 90% of web sites I go to.

It may not have achieved its loftiest aims, but I think the open web is an absolutely amazing achievement and success if you compare to what we would have had without it.

HackerNews uses tables for layout, inline styles, and still forces browsers into quirks mode. Yeah, it can handle slightly bumping up the font size. I can also bump up my font size on Windows, macOS, and Android, and that works for 90% of apps there too.

I agree that the open web is an amazing achievement. I don't think Wasm and WebGL take away from that at all. It's just the next logical step to make the web possible for an even greater set of applications.

Exactly. This is something which will most likely be lost by adoption of canvas webapps :( It will solely be on the webapp developer to implement/allow any kind of scaling. And generally such creators don't care. Webapps today are already pretty hostile - for example their embedded video players are often terrible but it is difficult or even impossible to play in an external dedicated players because of various chunk/blob/mediaSourceExtension/DRM stufof.

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