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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

joeyh.name

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#131

Post by Philpax »

charrondev wrote: post #130
_bent wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, performance and fidelity are definitely better with the canvas renderers, especially skwasm. Flutter is very inspired by React, but instead of React which does tree diffing to minimize rebuilds, Flutter tries to make rebuilds as cheap as possible instead - for example through its single pass layout algorithm. The issue is that this doesn't map well to the DOM. You can't rebuild cheaply on the DOM because you'd be…

I went and loaded up the flutter web demo on my iPhone 15 Pro https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/ In addition to the pitfalls mentioned like being unable to select text, every interaction including scrolling is noticeably laggy and dropping frames.

Wow, you weren't kidding: same phone and it feels like I'm using a 15-year-old Android. That's rough.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#135

Post by dakom »

JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

While some of this is true, some of it is not (deep links worked fine, there was a brief time where hidden html was encouraged and worked just as well for search engines to pick up, etc.)

More to the point though- Flash didn't shine as a regular website thing (Adobe people used Dreamweaver for that, if anything). It was a game/application development tool. Most of the time you didn't need any of these web-friendly things, same way you'd expect every game to have a different menu system.

It was an awesome time for innovation and creative thinking. Not everything is a flex box. I miss those days

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#136

Post by wat10000 »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #78
JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

> Nothing worked right. One thing worked right: the app looked the same and acted the same everywhere where it could run.

That’s a bug, not a feature. Apps should match the OS they’re running on.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#137

Post by dakom »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #80
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing worked right. One thing worked right: the app looked the same and acted the same everywhere where it could run.

WHich was... only windows computers since Flash barely worked on Macs or Linux, and never properly made it to mobile, where it was also a complete battery drain when it did in fact do things... sometimes.

Eh.. lots of projects targeted mobile app stores by authoring in Flash and using the GPU accelerated stuff. Starling was a semi-blessed framework. Worked perfectly well, no battery drain. Lots of "native" apps were authored that way (and still are, you see the same approach with Unity etc.)

Browser plugins could have been fixed to catch up, the VM itself wasn't the problem in terms of drain

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#138

Post by bflesch »

chrismorgan wrote: post #64
nmfisher wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic. There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.

Flutter even had a DOM renderer which should in theory have fixed approximately all the issues (I don’t know for sure, I never knowingly encountered anything using it), but they’ve killed it off fairly recently, doubling down on the fundamentally unfixable direction that is the pure-canvas approach.

Yeah, the strategic direction of flutter feels like the famous "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach. All the big companies prefer walled gardens.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#139

Post by Narretz »

nmfisher wrote: post #43
JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic. There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.

Wow, they still render to canvas? That's terrible. Just looked at this website: https://payamzahedi.com/toastification/

Feels janky just when scrolling. This is supposed to be the future?

Last time I used a flutter app they didn't even update the url for different screens.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#140

Post by afavour »

JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

I agree with everything you said but at the back of my mind is the knowledge that the previous Flash ecosystem was capable of an experience we still don’t see today, despite its many downsides.

I don’t want public facing web sites to use stuff like this, or Flutter. But some intranet internal tool… eh, fine.

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