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Comment by Gluber | Hacker News Reader

The browser platform with HTML/CSS is fundamently legacy over legacy and broken for most application styles ( not general pages ), and incurs insane development costs for even simple things ( been there done that for close to 17 years )

The current best option IMO is: Open Full Browser window size canvas (with webgl, webgpu backend graphics ) and draw everyhing yourself ( meaning with something else than the browser layout engine, lots of options available, Flutter, Avalonia etc... ) and deploy with your favourite programming language through WASM.

In fact a next generation browser should bascially be this, with the legacy browser functionality implemented as a WASM module that draws to this single canvas... The browser would become small and much easiert to secure ( only input, audio and general WASI style apis missing and to secure )

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Alan Kay in 1997:

> I really would like you to contrast that with what you have to do with HTML on the Internet. Think about it. HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that should understand its formats. This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS. [Laughter] This is really a shame. It's maybe what happens when physicists decide to play with computers, I'm not sure. [Laughter] In fact, we can see what's happend to the Internet now, is that it is gradually getting—There are two wars going on. There's a set of browser wars which are 100 percent irrelevant. They're basically an attempt, either at demonstrating a non-understanding of how to build complex systems, or an even cruder attempt simply to gather territory. I suspect Microsoft is in the latter camp here. You don't need a browser, if you followed what this Staff Sergeant in the Air Force knew how to do in 1961. You just read it in. It should travel with all the things that it needs, and you don't need anything more complex than something like X Windows. Hopefully better. But basically, you want to be able to distribute all of the knowledge of all the things that are there, and in fact, the Internet is starting to move in that direction as people discover ever more complex HTML formats, ever more intractable. This is one of these mistakes that has been recapitulated every generation. It's just simply not the way to do it.

And yet in the nearly thirty years since he said that, the browser has come to dominate how people interact with UIs. Both in terms of sheer popularity (not only do we have complex applications on the web, but we also package complex applications with browsers as desktop applications) as well as influence (SwiftUI, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose all borrow heavily from frameworks developed primarily for the web).

I think a lot of this has to do with the idea that Kay is criticising here: HTML as a mechanism for building applications has been so successful because it needs to be interpreted by a browser. That provides a tremendous level of sandboxing that makes it a lot easier to trust whatever website you're loading than the application you're installing. It also provides a grab-bag of useful controls and elements, while still being completely flexible with creating new ones without needing to resort to OOP inheritance chains or raw graphics drawing APIs. This is all to say nothing of accessibility, which is practically built into the browser.

> Full Browser window size cancas ... and draw everything yourself

This was already tried to some extent with Flash. Many sites were a single Flash module (or multiple). Implementing accessibility then required maintaining an invisible DOM representation of the Flash canvas. I personally don't want to return to the era where login and register buttons were dedicated Flash modules (MegaUpload did this back in ~2009) and many sites were an 800x600 image using the <area> tag for hitpoints.

Even Flutter has a DOM target because painting to a full <canvas> violates at the very least the operating system's text rendering, scrolling, and accessibility.

I agree with you that these things are important. However they are ( in implementation terms ) rather small issues, and determining i rather pay 4-8x more in development and maintenance costs just for this, while you can go the other way and make those features a bit hardware to implement seems like a not so good business case to me.

e.g we are using Avalonia. Of course everything is drawn in a scalable way, with responsive design etc... Accessibility is built in of course ( with integration with the relevant browser apis ) screenreaders work perfectly as do other accessibility features ) Its not the hap hazard way that flash did this (before there were relevant standards for these features anyways ) Invoking a brower api / interop is easy, the difference is we do not need to compromise our productivity for small things.

Flutter sadly deprecated the DOM renderer: https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/renderers

I would be so happy with inline-rendered, unblockable ads, always slightly different input/gesture handling and no accessibility!

Bye bye ad blocks?

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