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It’s a great point. This uses the canvas element only because it’s rendering in the browser. But this is really a desktop application, so the canvas element doesn't come up as a concept outside of WASM. Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text, and thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’s shaping and layout engines.

There are issues solved by the DOM for sure, but it requires shipping an entire web browser, and this product is a dedicated word processor. I’d rather face those issues head-on than defer to someone else’s implementation of such a core aspect. I know IME is broken, and Tritium’s really only able to address the needs of the happy path at the moment, but if can do that well, then there’s a business model to fund solving the edge cases to bring a real Word competitor to the desktop for lawyers.

> but it requires shipping an entire web browser

That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.

Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.

Isn't word really slow and also implemented as a web browser currently?

Not the version currently used by corporate lawyers, no.

I can't speak to the future, but let's say I hope so!

Word for Windows is fast and native. Word for Mac is slow, but still native.

VS Code, the aforementioned very performant Electron-based IDE, would like to differ

I'm not sure I agree it's "very performant", but nonetheless I do love it. (Compare it to Zed, for example.)

In any event, VS code is only required to render text in a single font, with very few layout concerns, styling, run-level formatting, etc. that require re-flowing across multiple of pages, etc. And each of those is text files measuring in the bytes. Tritium, by contrast, has to hold and operate on PDFs and Word documents each with very complicated layout and rendering logic and measuring in the kbs.

VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app. It benefits from having some of the best talent available working on it and has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance, both of which Microsoft is willing to pay for because VS Code entrenches them in the software development world in ways it wouldn’t be otherwise.

> has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance

Such as?

> VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app.

And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so. Oh wait, so it's not only VS Code?

> Such as?

At minimum it uses ripgrep for file searching, which is written in Rust but I thought I read blog posts about other parts in the past.

> And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so.

Out of the mentions in that list I’ve used, only Obsidian feels comparatively responsive to VS Code. Notion and Slack in particular are slow and can get super bogged down. Discord and Figma sit somewhere in between.

People praising VSCode's performance are probably better defined by having too fast computers than anything else, by all measures VSCode really isn't particularly lightweight nor performant.

It is definitely not as performant as Word on 5+ year old hardware that can barely run Windows 10, that many companies will happily order tons of.

Word has the worst performance ever. So I don't think competing with Word on performance should be hard.

Not necessarily. You can have dozens of Word instances open and it still doesn't bog the system down nearly as much as 5 Notions with the Chromium renderer. Word might not seem fast, but it's lightweight enough to work on the crappiest PCs you (or the IT dept) can find.

> thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’s shaping and layout engines.

Yes, if you want to run in the web browser, use the APIs the browser gives you. If you want to go wild, run directly on desktop OSes.

Web browsers just straight up don't have some of the APIs you will need for a working app. Accessibility is a major example. If you want to stay compliant with legislation (probably something to care about when selling to lawyers), you'll end up poorly re-implementing an inferrior version of your GUI framework as a DOM tree for accessibility.

Sometimes your use case is just so uncommon and esoteric that's genuinely what you need to do (see Google Docs), but keep in mind that it requires Google-like levels of engineering investments to do it at least somewhat well.

Very true! That's why this is just a "web preview". It's not intended to be used as the primary application. As mentioned elsewhere, the primary application is a desktop application that does look to leverage native APIs that aren't available on the web.

Build it on Makepad, who are building the UI framework (blew me away first time I saw it in action). Leaves you to build the app.

https://makepad.nl

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

Makepad is pure-canvas. It’s similarly entirely unsuitable on the web, and probably still not yet great on desktop, though it’s heading in the right direction.

I for one appreciate the "no html" approach.

That being said, if this is truly a desktop application, why waste time making it run in a browser? If the point is to have a preview, put the time into making some good short videos that can go into a preview page.

Because it's cool to get your hands on something before diving in. Also it allows users in walled off corporate environments to preview it without having to jump through thousands of hours of infosec hurdles.

Considering it's just the desktop application being rendered to a canvas, I imagine not a ton of effort even needed to be put in and the UI framework is handling most of it.

> Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text,

I took it as a claim that using the canvas you can't implement _inputs_ correctly. The example given was about compose sequences, but I'm sure there's much more to it.

Yeah the GP’s reply was a little misleading/ambiguous. It begins by saying “great point” but then it distorts & argues against that point.

Better just to disagree directly, I think.

Maybe u/piker misunderstood u/chrismorgan's point.

The way this app is architected with Rust and egui, they can write code once and deploy a GPU accelerated app across all major operating systems and the browser, without having to ship a web browser with their application. That's a strong draw for developers. I think it's important to ship products like this, even if some users are frustrated, because that frustration will breed innovation. Since they said it's meant to be desktop only, I think what they're doing is fine, as the web is just an added bonus.

The approach they've taken can create frustration, but it can also be seamless for users and create joy. For instance, I got to try out their app without any setup on my part, and then I can download it and it works exactly the same on my Windows and my Mac machines, because it's the same codebase for all three platforms. That kind of story was the holy grail of UI tooling for many years, and I think we should keep going down that path to improve it, despite frustrations along the way.

You do get a lot for free with the DOM, but it's messy, works differently between different browser and you have to constantly fight it. With your own rendering engine it's more work but you have much more freedom and can get better performance.

With DOM you get accessibility integration. At least in the EU if you provide a web service you have to be accessible, otherwise you can get sued.

IANAL,afaik the accessibility law is only for government monopoly services. But I don't think it matters, because if you use the DOM you still need to test if the app works in screen readers etc, even normal websites have trouble with accessibility.

AFAIK it applies to everyone. But you don't get automatically fined, someone has to sue first. Maybe there has to be a business relation between the user and the web site? And yes, with HTML you need to still use all the right tags and attributes to make it accessible. Firefox has a nice accessibility tree view in its dev tools that you can use for debugging. Is there something like that for this toolkit? Is it somehow exposing an accessibility tree? Replicating everything in DOM for accessibility?

This is explicitly called out in the canvas spec's best practices section with a laundry list of things you'd have to re-implement [1].

> Authors should avoid implementing text editing controls using the canvas element. Doing so has a large number of disadvantages:

> [...]

> This is a huge amount of work, and authors are most strongly encouraged to avoid doing any of it by instead using the input element, the textarea element, or the contenteditable attribute.

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html#best-prac...

Wait, which 2 do you expect to become usable?

It might not be particularly visible from outside just yet, but we’ve reached the stage where a lot of the fundamentals (which are typically deplorable in quick-and-dirty libraries) really are being nailed down quite nicely; and, perhaps more importantly, where a lot of the different teams are sharing work and collaborating on libraries, rather than each project starting from scratch. The momentum around AccessKit is the most visible example of this.

The Linebender community is a very promising venue for such collaboration, and there are at least four organisations investing quite a bit into this and related endeavours.

I won’t name any specific two libraries. It also depends a little on whether you’re targeting web tech only, or web and desktop, or desktop. (Or mobile.)