Hacker News Reader

Comment by voiture_rapide | Hacker News Reader

Flutter Web exists and works reasonably well.

No, it doesn't. Try dealing with accessibility, emoji, screen readers, non-English languages. The people in charge left all of that "TBD" and now they've backed themselves into on unsolvable corner with their "render everything to a canvas". They didn't understand what they were dong. The web apps feel like Swing in Java.

Type some CJK in here and watch as each letter appears 500ms late, or try to bring up the emoji input on MacOS

https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/form_app/#/form_widget...

The emoji input does work on Chrome OS

>Reasonably well

Rendering to a canvas does not "work reasonably well", unless you want to go back to Flash days (but controlled by google this time)

Therein lies the future, thanks WebAssembly.

Blazor, Uno, Qt, Yew, Flutter,....

Although WASM is brilliant, I don't think its right to use it to recreate the whole UI drawn to canvas. You loose all accessibility integration with the OS either locking out users or making your life much harder reimplementing it. WASM is perfect for graphics and backend processing, see Figma it uses WASM for drawing the canvas but the rest of the ui is native web with all the accessibility tools that come with the browser/os.

My life was made much harder when Flash and Silverlight like tooling was taken away.

The craziness of faking UIs with paragraph tags massaged via CSS and JavaScript into a drop down menu.

Now they are back, even Google Docs is moving into it.

Yew doesn't use the canvas, it uses the DOM iirc.

I stand corrected on that one.

Wrong

https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/form_app/#/form_widget...

He talks about Yew [0], and you link to flutter?

[0] https://yew.rs/

Sorry.

That's a philosophical issue, not a functionality one: something can work reasonably well even if you hate the world that results.

(And I sadly just can't buy the philosophical issue anyway, frankly: if anything, I'd argue the biggest flaw with the web is it has a million nit-picky features when it should ONLY offer JavaScript+canvas, as third parties have a hope of reimplementing that correctly, unlike HTML+CSS. To the extent to which there were important behaviors people liked, such as accessibility, those should come from higher-level frameworks instead of being baked into the lowest level of the system.)

accessibility is not a behavior that "people liked". It is enshrined in law in so many countries that they _have_ to be at the lowest level of the system.

I would argue it was enshrined in law because people liked it so much they demanded it, so maybe that's a semantics issue? That said, I do not believe the law insists that it be in the lowest level: the law merely insists that it exist for every site. It is convenient to put it at the lowest level if possible, but now it is just one more thing that literally every browser has to implement from scratch, and so the world that results is that the only company capable of making a good web browser is Google. There are sane reasons why accessibility is not considered part of a CPU (and thereby by most other reasonable runtime engines).

People with reading disabilities, vision issues, etc are rarely the ones being heavily represented in parliaments. Accessibility is truly a case of things being earned through spilled blood, and while there's probably much fewer people dying because they can't read the text on your website, it's a natural extension of the physical world. While the laws do not say that it should be up to the browser, it becomes natural that this moves to the lowest common denominator. Should it not be part of browsers, the moment any dominant browser comes in (say, Chrome) and implements it would lead to thousands of websites relying on this behavior from the browser, leading to "Works only on Chrome" situations, and other browsers most likely rushing behind to also support that feature.

> I'd argue the biggest flaw with the web is it has a million nit-picky features when it should ONLY offer JavaScript+canvas

That would break the web, though? One of the biggest _strengths_ of the web is backwards compatibility.. I, for one, am grateful to use modern browsers to consume older content and apps.

This is a "the web made a fatal mistake in the past and should have done X" argument and not a "the web should now do X" argument, though if you want a forward-looking suggestion we need to immediately stop adding NEW behaviors.

This is a strange position considering I would rank the JavaScript engine as, bar none, the most complex and difficult part of the entire browser stack to develop and keep maintained, and it continues to grow and become more and more complex along with the runtimes implementing it, which were already incredibly complex by design.

> behaviors people liked, such as accessibility

lol

I don't disagree--though I know people, including myself, who have managed to pull off either all of or most of the work required alone--and so in an argument about the JavaScript engine I would argue it should be a VM only, such as WebAssembly.

(As for accessibility, I appreciate you might find my wording funny, but it isn't a laughing matter really.)

True, although if you are trying to build a cross platform app where the web is a major part of it, I wouldn't even look at the Flutter and default to Capacitor.

If by reasonably well you mean barely hits 20 fps on Desktop and unusable on mobile then sure, it works reasonably well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com