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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#191

Post by jauntywundrkind »

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.

Coopting the web as a low level platform, to be bent into blast utterly non web stuff feels like a gross misdeed to me, that directly violated rfc8890 "the internet is for end users".

Flutter or somethint similar maybe possibly perhaps might some day conceivably eventually rebuild enough platform that the major gaps and faults and chasms of it might be less terribly ruinous, but users will never have anywhere near as much agency. User scripting will always be at the extent the developer's enable it. Its terrible to think of the web denigrated to being as closed foreign and black box as regular apps are, would set back human conputing's one little tenous bridge of progress back immeasurably.

None the less, theres folks who believe the developer experience trumps all other concerns, and are still full steam ahead on canvas based systems. One of those people is Ian Hixie, former editor of the HTML specification, who authored what is sort of the manifesto of the canvas-based effort, Towards a Modern Stack,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...

Plz plz no.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#192

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Note that there's a really good HTML Wayland composer already. Existing Wayland apps run via a proxy process injecting apps into the browser.

And there is a web+wasm stack using Wayland constructs for apps that run purely in the browser+compositor.

Incredibly cool work. Greenfield: https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#193

Post by berkes »

jfoster wrote: post #170
berkes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI might be heading towards a situation where you can "tell it to build a full featured browser". But this narrative is naive at best, and frankly, getting annoying too. Especially because it gets repeated by people who know even less about "programming" than those who start this idea in the first place. That AI cannot maintain this browser. It cannot monitor and fix performance issues. It won't be able to refactor s…

What is the fundamental limitation that prevents AI from ever doing the maintenance tasks that you mentioned? Current AI cannot, of course, but the trajectory seems to be that it will be able to do such things better & faster than any human can.

Two things:

This requires a language that a human can give the specs in. A language that is both precise and unambiguous and understandable by humans. A... programming language?

And it requires AI to understand the effects of changes it makes. On many levels. "If I move this module behind an abstraction, will it make it easier to maintain? Does it touch performance? Would it open security issues?" Generative AI isn't good at reasoning in that way. Maybe other AI, but it seems hardly anyone is pouring substantial funding into areas other than "a bigger and smarter generator than the competition" currently.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#194

Post by Apocryphon »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #191
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.

Coopting the web as a low level platform, to be bent into blast utterly non web stuff feels like a gross misdeed to me, that directly violated rfc8890 "the internet is for end users". Flutter or somethint similar maybe possibly perhaps might some day conceivably eventually rebuild enough platform that the major gaps and faults and chasms of it might be less terribly ruinous, but users will never have anywhere near as…

Sounds like his viewpoint is someone burned out by all of his prior work coming to seeming naught

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622514

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#195

Post by zfg »

pjmlp wrote: post #184
zfg wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That man closed the Apple ecosystem doors on Flash Which is exactly the point, isn't it. Adobe's business model around Flash was so fragile that he could do it. He couldn't do it to the web.

Ever heard about all those ChromeOS features that Safari is not supporting and how PWAs are a failure? How is that WebGL 2.0 experience going on iOS? Ever wondered why after a decade there is hardly any WebGL game that can match any serious game done with OpenGL ES.3.0 on mobile phones, starting with the famous Infinity Blade?

And this explains why Flash is dead? WebAssembly lives on. Embrace him.

WebGPU will make you happier.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#196

Post by rad_gruchalski »

c-hendricks wrote: post #180
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have different memories from before 2012. Flex apps I built were used on all 3 and worked flawlessly in AIR. Looked and behaved exactly the same everywhere. Indeed, though, barely made to mobile. But Nokia N95 was pretty cool.

What was the process of installing AIR like on Linux?

I really don’t know. Back in 2009 I was contracting for this company in Worthing. They have a US location in Florida, and are selling aircraft spare parts. I have built an application in Flex for them which was used for taking all sales orders, place purchase orders, manage clients, suppliers, stock, and invoice by people on a call floor. It was great, it worked in every browser where Flash Player could be installed. When AIR came out, in became a standalone application with a wrapper loading the swf file generated for the web app. It worked on Windows and Mac, Snow Leopard back then. It was great, app could be updated by making the new swf available for download on the local network, and waiting for users to restart the app. They did that twice a day: when going to lunch, and when going home. The app remembered everything they were working on. It was great.

It took us good three years, it was eventually feature complete and used by 120 people on two local installations synchronised back then with Dropbox (hey, I didn’t know any better and it actually worked great over a hurricane m). We have replaced a home-grown COBOL app.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#197

Post by noduerme »

ReinoudL wrote: post #156
noduerme wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point... the fragmentation and the steep learning curves for each stack (and constantly needing to be on top of breaking changes deeper in the stack) all amplify each other and make it much more difficult for amateur designers to build and ship something. Back in flash days, I knew lots of cartoonists and graphic artists who could build interactive experiences on their own that they wanted to put out…

Second try: Hi noduerme, I'm the guy who wrote the original 'Kaos'. I stumbled upon the discussion about it, and have no idea how to contact you besides commenting here... Any way I can message you?

Hi! I've temporarily put my email contact in my profile here...

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#198

Post by a2128 »

Narretz wrote: post #139
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.

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.

I'm shocked every time I use a Flutter web app. Not even one of the highest-end desktop GPUs on the market is enough to animate a dark mode toggle at more than a choppy 2fps. In one app with a login page, my password manager fills out the password into the username field, though I'm surprised it's able to fill anything at all. You'll be lucky if you can even select text on the screen or copy a link, though I know some websites would love if they can prevent you from doing that at a technical level. Text editing feels sluggish and doesn't behave the same way as standard web text fields when using advanced keyboard controls. I'm thankful that technologies like Flutter never took off on the web, and I hope they never will.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#199

Post by tabinno »

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.

You should not blame your lack of knowledge on the tool.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#200

Post by tabinno »

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……

Thing is - it’s even worse when people sit down and create actual real alternatives to desktop apps in a document distribution system.

For apps, Canvas is the solution. For pages - DOM.

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