Hacker News Reader

Comment by eigenvalue | Hacker News Reader

I worry that this sort of technology is going to lead to webapps that aren't really what we've grown to think of as "the web" but which will instead be closer to a VNC window where you just see pixels and can't interact with anything or see how stuff works in devtools.

View on HN

Is it bad though? This is of course a rethoric question, I don't know myself if I think it's good or bad, yet.

What I'm thinking is: there's been soo much discussion around "we have corrupted the Web", "Web standards were never made to build apps on", etc. with sometimes good and sometimes really bad arguments.

If we can build viewports in canvas that behave more like just a desktop environment where apps can be built, maybe that could be good? It could mean a split between the informational web and the "apps on the browser" paradigm, and in a ideal scenario this could make things simpler and more organized for everyone? Or it could just mean more work, more standards, more rupture and more siloing. Honestly don't know.

It wouldn't be bad if we were sure it wasn't going to be abused to make apps where ads cannot be blocked, consent extortion pop-up cannot be removed, content cannot be copy-pasted, etc. unfortunately, this is the way this industry is always going, so there's good reason to be scared.

(It's also terrible for accessibility, for both disabled people or just regular users who expect to be able to navigate with the keyboard for instance, unless the framework re-implement everything itself, which I doubt)

> unless the framework re-implement everything itself

In which case, we're able to make an "inspect element" tool, which we could use to copy text out, and at the very least draw black rectangles on top of adverts. https://xkcd.com/2677/

A major point of the web for me back in the 90s was that everything was text. You could inspect it, you could change it, you could curl it. That’s why Java and Flash and Silverlight were so annoying, they were blackboxes inside web pages. I can’t help but see this today like those yesterday.

Accessibility features would need to be added to canvases before that reality's possible, so we've got a ways to go yet before we need to worry too much about that.

traditionally, lack of accessibility has unfortunately not held back people's use of tech, see Flash and most SPAs

The people who would do this canvas trickery are the people that would be held back by the lack of accessibility.

I don't see this, or any other equivalent effort, taking off. It's neat, but CSS layout is a small part of the overall problem. Even setting side accessibility, which is a massive undertaking in and of itself, you have text rendering.

To get an idea of what you'd have to emulate, here are some (not even all) issues related to rendering text: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

That’s what a GUI app is, though. You could say it’s the default way we interact with graphical apps. Web browsers, along with web-enabled platforms, add a bunch of extra stuff to that.

Many of us just want good, GUI apps for many things. They were often faster and lighter. VS Code is the exception to the rule which I use regularly.

This discussion reminds me a bit of the description of Fujitsu trying to implement Habitat in Japan:

“…instead of sending a command message to the object on the server, the client would send the X-Y coordinates of your mouse click. The server would then render its own copy of the scene into an internal buffer to figure out what object you had clicked on. Not only was this extremely inefficient, but the race conditions inherent a multi-user environment meant that it also sometimes just got the wrong answer. It was amazing…”

http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

Every snake eats its own tail eventually - we went from bit blasting onto a frame buffer in 320x200 to bit blasting vector graphics onto a virtual frame buffer. (I leave out earlier steps and later steps, but every implementation eventually tries to implement its framework - it seems like the natural flow of things)

Like flash?

Seems like less of a risk than the flash days because browsers are faster and more capable, and stuff like this is currently a subset of what the browser can do, instead of a superset like flash was (or the strong vendor push like microsoft silverlight).

Not old enough to have been a dev when flash was in it's prime though so might not have the most accurate view.

Even without this that is happening in small ways. I've seen a few fairly visual pages (graphs & charts, etc.) where parts that could be done with plain HTML+CSS such as separate tables containing the data (or a subset thereof) displayed in the charts was also rendered on a canvas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com