Show HN: A tool to build real websites built exclusively in SVG

I looked at the website on my big 1440p monitor. It looked cool.

I resized the window to a still reasonable size (1280-ish width). Now some of the text is waay too small for me to read. 1366x768 is a still pretty common laptop resolution..!

I can't zoom in the text like on a regular page, it just makes the whole thing bigger, like an image.

I also can't use my favourite a11y tool waspline reader [1] because the HTML is hidden :-( but... I'm not a blind person who uses a screen reader. I'm an ADHD'er with visual snow. I can't change the fonts to ones which are a little more readable for me - and the font rendering in SVG images on Firefox on my linux computer isn't the best.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/waspline-read... ^ tbh, considering a lot of stuff I read is in PDF form I am thinking about doing an equivalent of this that does OCR on the viewport and applies a shader so it works on anything, and it only really applies to long blocks of text, which aren't a feature of the kinds of things you're targeting (flyers, product landing pages etc) but I wanted to highlight some of the less obvious accessibility stuff that's around.

I get it, pretty much everything posted to HN gets the "I don't like the design of this site for technical reasons" treatment (especially when it's an article on someone's blog and nobody was asking lol), but I do wanna highlight the not-so-obvious accessibility stuff.

Lots of folk will get by without complaining, because they're kinda used to tech and design being a bit difficult, and they aren't aware how we can improve things for them! I've seen my mum pull out a magnifying glass to read stuff on tablets before - she finds it easier than trying to get pinch-to-zoom to work - "I hate the panning from left to right all the time. It's not like reading a book. I'll forget what the start of the bloody sentence was!". Some people will attribute it to just "not being good with technology", which makes me sad for the users.

SVG is great but that "20 years of HTML and CSS" shouldn't be dismissed because it makes designs take longer.

I think it's really exciting that we have such a powerful layout engine in web browsers these days; the best BEST site designs I've seen take the best of vector art and responsive design. It is SO satisfying having a good vector landing page where the text still reflows, different things are visible when you resize the window etc.

I think your tool is great though, I just think you should run with all the "what about responsive design?" HN comments - you could have a really, really really good tool if you can support breakpoints, fluid layouts and reflowable text sections. The kind that people would pay $$$ for...

Plus, it's gotten a lot better since flex layouts became a thing in CSS!

I think Illustrator etc are missing a trick here too because they're designed more for print media, right?? What would be awesome is if there was a similar editor + format where responsiveness and fluidity were baked right into the authoring flow, like at the layer / object-group level, so you could say "those layers have to be pixel perfect, this one will show up at these sizes, this other one will stretch this amount, that one will scale relatively compared to that one" and hopefully end up with designs that you, the designer, are always satisfied with, which require little or no further work to adapt to other screen sizes, DPIs, devices, etc....

Out of curiosity, what techniques are impossible in HTML? I ask this because I too am working on a website builder, and wonder what might be too complicated or impossible for people to implement.

If you add a dark background inline style to the html root element, you get rid of the white background lurking from behind when pulling down. The white is blinding.