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Comment by bingemaker | Hacker News Reader

Exporting to web using Flutter is a nightmare I believe. When I checked last time, rendering happens on a canvas. There is no markup at all

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I use Flutter for some web apps, it works fine. It's good for web apps, not web sites, and compared to other desktop or mobile apps, there is literally no difference between rendering on a canvas to rendering on Qt or SwiftUI. People, in my experience, just get up in arms about the web that does not happen with other technologies.

> compared to other desktop or mobile apps, there is literally no difference between rendering on a canvas to rendering on Qt or SwiftUI.

Except, you know, accessibility.

> just get up in arms about the web that does not happen with other technologies.

And for a good reason.

Flutter has a wild accessibility system that also exports DOM elements just for the aria labels.

This all breaks the browser’s in page search function though! Long standing bug with no fix yet.

Do you realize that Flutter has an accessibility system that is often more advanced than most desktop UI frameworks? [0] I notice this often from non-Flutter devs, Flutter has some pretty good a11y.

[0] https://docs.flutter.dev/accessibility-and-localization/acce...

Good to know! For the longest time ever their export to web was just canvas with no attempt at making it accessible.

I don’t know if even that was actually true? As far as I know the moment they introduced canvas as a rendering target they also produced a DOM structure along side it to capture the accessibility tree as they were still waiting on a more native solution in the form of AOM (accessibility object model) to be finalised.

> rendering happens on a canvas

flutter run --web-renderer=html

Glad to know that this exists!

Yeah, there is even more fun arguments like "--enable-impeller" to massively improve the rendering performance!

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