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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

joeyh.name

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#71

Post by brabel »

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.

They still seem to have something, from this page: https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...

* Inspect the HTML tree containing the ARIA attributes generated by Flutter.

Wouldn't that help with SEO as well?

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#72

Post by zfg »

incrudible wrote: post #70
zfg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. WebAssembly is different. WebAssembly brings every language to the web. Flash didn't. WebAssembly can render to canvas and enable applications that compile to desktop, mobile, and the web. UI libraries like Avalonia do this: https://avaloniaui.net/ For example, here's C# implementation of Visual Basic 6 compiled to WebAs…

…and yet we still do not have the streamlined authoring experience we had with Flash. The stuff you show is just a crappier way to write boring GUIs with some other language for which you need to download the runtime. Flash let many more people create far more fun stuff than any Web standard ever did. People forget that Flash also brought C/C++ to the web at some point, but besides some flashy demos, nobody really ca…

> and yet we still do not have the streamlined authoring experience we had with Flash.

Uno for example has a visual designer: https://platform.uno/hot-design/

> The problem is that all this choice creates fragmentation

That's not a problem. Build things the way you want in the language you want.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#73

Post by stakhanov »

neuroelectron wrote: post #22
jillesvangurp wrote: post #9

> So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation. The premise of this article seems completely wrong. Chromium, S…

The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large players like Google have the resources to dictate how the web evolves, while any newcomer faces insurmountable hurdles in achieving compatibility, security, and speed. Even major tech companies have tried and failed (e.g., Microsoft ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium…

> Can anyone do anything about it?

Yes, Donald Trump can, because these are all American companies. If he pushes the rest of the world hard enough, the amount of will and the amount of resource that will be mobilized to get out from under the thumb of U.S. tech domination will be something none of us has ever seen in their lifetimes.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#74

Post by nsonha »

My take would be starting with WAI-ARIA, or create a new standard with similar goal and keep the standard minimal and single-purpose. We are heading into the era of AI driven UI anyway.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#76

Post by brabel »

TingPing wrote: post #59
aredox wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the market share. And look at how much breakage report there is with Firefox vs. Chrome or Safari (not to say the return of "this website works better with Chrome" disclaimers, as if we were back to IE6).

Do you have a source for real world sites broken? It’s extremely rare for me and I exclusively use Safari and Firefox.

There's a lot of websites that break for me on Firefox. Most examples are things like small businesses contact forms... I also had trouble with a kitchen design website. I can't remember what it was, but one just showed me a blank page unless I was on a Chrome-based browser.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#77

Post by LelouBil »

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.

I was excited about Compose Multiplatform Web too, until I realized it also does this : everything in a canvas

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#78

Post by rad_gruchalski »

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.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#79

Post by noduerme »

incrudible wrote: post #70
zfg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. WebAssembly is different. WebAssembly brings every language to the web. Flash didn't. WebAssembly can render to canvas and enable applications that compile to desktop, mobile, and the web. UI libraries like Avalonia do this: https://avaloniaui.net/ For example, here's C# implementation of Visual Basic 6 compiled to WebAs…

…and yet we still do not have the streamlined authoring experience we had with Flash. The stuff you show is just a crappier way to write boring GUIs with some other language for which you need to download the runtime. Flash let many more people create far more fun stuff than any Web standard ever did. People forget that Flash also brought C/C++ to the web at some point, but besides some flashy demos, nobody really ca…

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 there. That basically does not happen at all now.

I'm pretty sure Flash (Stage3D) was also the first way to leverage a GPU on the web... for those of us who wanted to go a bit deeper...

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#80

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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.

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.
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