Comment by humzashahid98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by humzashahid98 | Hacker News Reader

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Uno wants applications to look the same across platforms (as Flutter does) but still wants to use native controls. So their approach[0] is to have default styling applied to every control which makes the native controls look the same on each device [0].

I think the main benefit with this approach is expected-behaviour (like how different desktop operating systems have different textbox behaviour), and that whatever accessibility you get by default with native controls is there. [1]

I don't really find their approach to GUI development compelling though, with them choosing a middle ground between "wrapper around native controls" and "implement everything yourself".

[0] Except on Linux and web, where Uno draws everything itself, imitating controls that look like GTK (on Linux) or UWP/WinUI (on web). These are the platforms I briefly tested on and I didn't have an enjoyable experience with the output due to non-native/non-expected behaviours.

[1] Page on accessibility: https://platform.uno/docs/articles/features/working-with-acc...

Uno Maintainer here - Thanks for trying out Uno! At this time, the default render mode is provide a uniform look across platforms, and it's possible to alter the theme using Material, Fluent or Cupertino, or to design your own theme using control template styling, or even use native controls directly where applicable.

On Linux, we've just released our support for X11, removing the need for GTK. As we're drawing the whole app surface, we're always interested in adjust the UX of our controls on individual platforms. If you have examples, let us know.

Finally, for WebAssembly, our current rendering backend is using the HTML DOM, which means that accessibility and other native behaviors are functional. Same here, if anything accessibility related is missing, we're all ears!

Hi there. Appreciate the response!

I didn't know that the HTML DOM is being used for Uno's web output but that's good to hear. I was under the impression that things were being drawn to canvas (like how Flutter's web output works) but functionality like Ctrl-F (text search) works on https://gallery.platform.uno/, showing that's not the case.

I'm not sure why I had the impression that the web output used HTML canvas, but maybe that was something that changed since I last looked a few years ago or there might be another reason I was mistaken.

I think one misleading thing that gives the wrong impression is that text isn't selectable on Uno's web output (like https://gallery.platform.uno/), similar to how text isn't selectable on HTML canvas.

I think it's worth having a discussion about that with other employees, because it's one divergence from user expectations about how the web usually works (but application developers may also prefer to make text not selectable so it may be the behaviour you want in some cases after all).

Indeed, text selection is a specific behavior that was chosen to be disabled by default in order to be closer to the original behavior of WinUI on desktop. This is a configurable behavior on the TextBlock control, though.

That's the choice people face: "native" (different on all platforms) vs "synthetic" (looks the same but loses true native functionality).

Correct - and with Uno you get to chose either one of those approaches - https://platform.uno/pixel-perfect/

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