Ask HN: How would the web rendering platform be designed today?

#1

Post by mnr » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

If the web rendering platform (css/dom, etc.) were created from scratch today, how would it be designed differently?

Knowing it will be used for web apps and WITHOUT backwards compatibility as a goal.

Edit: which css properties would be discarded/kept?

Re: Ask HN: How would the web rendering platform be designed today?

#2

Post by Klonoar » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 3:55 PM UTC

Y'know, it's probably not a popular opinion... but if the web were 100% recreated today, I'd want it to be AutoLayout (from Apple/co) + CSS.

AutoLayout is not without issues, but a lot of them have been fixed over the past few years, and overall I think the mental model makes sense once it clicks.

CSS is the one thing the web got right, in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: How would the web rendering platform be designed today?

#3

Post by krapp » Sat, Apr 21, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

I suspect that a platform for rendering streaming applications (which is basically what this would be, if "web apps" are its primary purpose) would probably not use CSS/HTML at all. The purpose of those is to display and format a subset of XML documents.

I would imagine all of the rendering would be done natively, and browsers would be replaced by VMs, and the DOM with some sort of cross-platform application library like SDL.

So basically, like Java or Flash, but language agnostic (rather than serving HTML, sites would serve source code that compiles to WebAssembly, or just the WASM itself) and maybe with something like a dependency manager for common libraries or runtimes.