> "Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML," explained Sneath. "And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we've got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class."
So, you're saying we will abandon DOM and HTML & use Canvas to push pixels in people's faces? That... does not sound very web like to me. The "different class" that Flutter is "unapologetic" about sounds like VNC or Flash; a completely controlled, locked down, isolated little fief nestled inside the web page. Again, like Flash.
> "We're aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself."
Not on Flutters priority list/not supported after the Flutter revolution: user-agency, web extensions, view-source, malleability, standards, interoperability, support from existing accessibility tools.
I actually think Flutter is an interesting set of tech & am glad to see another entrant to building apps. But every-time they open their mouth, it's to badmouth & insult the web, to highlight how their game plan to win is by becoming evil & ruining interoperability & standards as hard & fast as they can.
The priority system here seems deranged & anti-human to me; 'we take the only successful standards based hyper-medium on the planet, and we reduce it to a Canvas renderer that shoves pixels in your face, with 100% control from Google over what those pixels are and how they work.' We forfeit all user control, we give up all ability to read & parse & modify each other's web content. And for what? "Pixel perfect level of control?" "High graphical fidelity"? "Draw and manage every part of the environment yourself?" Bro, your app is not that important. There's other kinds of delight; I think users are waking up to how shallow & controlled & manipulative apps are, and doubling down on "we just need slicker design systems to really really delight our users" (and capture them for good!) is a limited game.
This is a nightmare, one where only a very very few players have control over the technological environment, one where humanity has no say, no stake, no control. What Flutter proposes is the most polarizing end of what Ursala Franklin talks about in technological society, where who can build the environment, who has say, how things form is extremely narrowly controlled. It talks to utterly prescriptivist ends where humankind merely receives technology as it is built from the corporation, and that end is forever & always enough (& all that is possible). The web, to me, has been defined & shaped by being more, by being better, by having a deeper level of engagement, owing to a malleable & open platform that users participate in, every time we install an extension, every time we run a user style sheet; a holism.
When we invited the "intertwingularity" back in the Cluetrain Manifesto days, there was a value system trying to come out, that humanity is empowered when systems are open & out there & when we can explore what is possible. I welcome technological innovation, but the wanton disregard & active badmouthing the Flutter spokespeople have for malleable systems, for standards & interoperation, their willingness to inflate their own importance by insulting & denigrating web extensions, user agency: it's an incredibly poor look for their would be new Flash project, for their attempt to make an impervious, inaccessible, unmodifiable prison of control within the web & atop native. I'd like to see a tone shift, where they talk about how they'll better work with the web, rather than usurp it's bones to build a new monstrous titan of app-dev.
Thankfully this 3.7 release actually has some perhaps possible good news, that maybe/perhaps Flutter can be intermixed somewhat with HTML/DOM on the page. The Register suggests perhaps Flutter's HTML/DOM mode and it's CanvasKit pixel-blaster mode can perhaps interoperate some. It's hard to tell right now how well Flutter might possibly be able to play within the web. But it's hard to recognize even the possibility- to see that the Flutter team really has any empathy what-so-ever for the web & web standards- when their rhetoric so proudly champions things that seem actively bad for the user, when so much of the work still looks like source-free, unmodifiable islands of Flash on the page; it wasn't good then, & it's still harmful now, & it's hard to appreciate the potential gain when it so lopsidedly enhances corporate control. But at least there is some evidence that Flutter is trying to do a little more interweaving than before... although again, it's hard to recognize that when the current rhetoric from the team is so mono-focused on their graphical capabilities above all.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/25/flutter_3_7/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34519279
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_...