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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

Hrumph ... should just port it to shoes[1] and be done with it. Just kidding, just kidding. But really, why can't we have an HTML5 layout engine for native applications?

1: https://github.com/shoes/shoes4

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Why would you want to use HTML5 for native applications? It's bad enough that you have to use it for websites.

A fair point and I was mostly joking about shoes. Though the child to this makes a solid point that if you've ever done GUI work, HTML5 is at the very least comparable to the pain of the myriad toolkits provided on other platforms.

Also, +1 for the resurgence[1] of tk for lightweight GUI apps : -) Who needs native anything, when THE tool kit is installed everywhere python is (which is also everywhere).

1: http://pybee.org/

No no no. I wish i could always use html ui in my applications. It's leagues ahead of layout/form/widget based ui solutions. Styling native elements is like bending metal bars with bare hands.

You can, that's our app[1] works; it's essentially a webapp hosted in a QtWebKit widget. And Brackets[2] and Light Table[3] work similarly.

1: http://www.rstudio.com/ide/ 2: http://www.brackets.io/ 3: http://www.lighttable.com/

Because HTML wasn't created with GUIs as a use-case, and it shows.

Although we mostly get away with it in today's strange world of reinventing the wheel inside a browser, it's still a hack.

doesn't this happen with node.js?

(I'm not sure at all)

Node.js is not a rendering engine. It is a platform for implementing server-side software in JavaScript.

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